They cried. And now that they’re having it handed to them, they’re still crying.
It wasn’t that long ago that the natioanl left was decrying the fact that the ‘Minimum Wage’ hadn’t been increased in a while. In fact, I’m sure that if I looked around a bit, I could find something from last week. Probably quite a few somethings.
Now the House (R)s have given the (D)s a $2.00 an hour increase in the minimum wage (to $7.15 and hour) on paper and the (R)s are ready to vote for it. But because the same bill contains an extension for Bush’s tax cuts and kills the national estate tax, the Dems are crying.
Not that they will, but if they were to come and ask my opinion, I’d say to grab it with both hand, because the likelyhood of them getting another shot at it anytime soon is close to nil (yes, I know what is happening this November. No, I don’t think they’ll do that well).
Just as I told a commenter who didn’t agree that Maryland’s anti-WalMart bill was socialism, the ‘Minimum Wage’ laws are a tariff on labor. People with no skills get paid less and that less should be whatever the person offering the job is willing to offer.
If his offer is too low, then he will have either no employees or ones who are absolutely unemployable (basically the same thing), because good people go where the money is at.
The idea of a “National Minimum Wage” is insipid in and of itself. Trying to live on $5.15 an hour is not the same in Butte, Montana as it is in Seattle, Washington. States and even Counties and Cities should be the ones enacting ‘Minimum Wage’ laws, not the federal government.
While the laws themselves are no less ignorant when enacted by smaller governments, in that way, each city and state can compete for employers just as the employers will compete for the workers and the employees can compete for the jobs.
I’ve seen the impact of higher minimum wages. They’ve got a $6.75 minimum wage in California. when I visited a couple of years ago, the local McDonalds (a classic source of minimum wage jobs) had a machine that did the entire job of cooking french fries except for sprinkling on the salt and putting them in the packages and another one that automatically dispensed the drinks.
The fry machine was even tied into the registers so that it knew how many to make. It dumped fries into the basket, moved it to an empty fry slot, lowered it, waited, raised the basket, thumped it a couple of times to get some of the oil off, and then dumped them into the fry hopper.
The drink machine took the proper sized cup, dispensed the right quantity of ice (none, light, or regular) into it, moved it down the conveyor belt to the proper spigot, filled it, waited for the foam to die down, topped it off, and then moved it over to where a drone could put a cap on it and hand it to the customer.
I noticed that this restaurant had significantly fewer employees than your typical one does.
Give a $2/hr increase and for a place that is running multiple shifts you’re talking about a good ten grand a year. Every year. When the robots get cheaper to run than the people, the people go away.