President Obama’s turns at self-congratulation during his State of the Union address last week might pass without notice, if he hadn’t advertised our “economic recovery.” When he took office in January 2009, the unemployment rate had reached a limping 7.9 percent. Now, four years and more than $1 trillion in stimulus spending later, it’s a much cheerier 7.8 percent. That number swells to 14.4 percent when you include those who have been looking for work for so long they’ve given up, no longer full of the audacity of hope.
In a spirit of progressive innovation, Mr. Obama has looked back to 1938 to find his grand response to our jobs crisis: raising the minimum wage. In overwrought rhetoric meant to evoke images of Dust Bowl depression, he lamented the fact that a “family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line.” Increasing the minimum wage is such a powerful tool it “could mean the difference between groceries and the food bank, rent or eviction, scraping by or finally getting ahead.” It’s a strange curiosity that Mr. Obama has waited so long to unveil this transformative economic mechanism.
Is Mr. Obama’s dramatic depiction of American squalor accurate? No, not even close. Contrary to the Dickensian hyperbole, most of the working poor already earn more than the minimum wage. In fact, less than 1 percent of all working Americans fall below that income threshold, and the majority of them are above the poverty line. In fact, raising the minimum wage affects only a minuscule portion of Americans.
Moreover, approximately 60 percent of that population work part time, and more than half of them are younger than 25. The majority of these jobs are temporary positions held by younger people looking to make a little extra income, not parents desperately trying to keep their families afloat.
Read more: http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/20/how-obamas-minimum-wage-proposal-will-kill-jobs/#ixzz2LRXJJkkH
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment