OK, so Bush passed a minimum wage correction. I didn't say that there should not be a minimum wage -- there should be or we would have workers forced to negotiate their labor down to unsustainable wages. But, that minimum wage, whatever the "reasonable" number is, ought to be corrected at a rate no higher than the amount of inflation or consumer price impact that is necessary to maintain the buying power of that money from year to year.
It should be the result of an equation, not of class warfare speeches and emotional leverage. Problems whose solutions lie in the realm of mathematics should be easy to fix.
The Democrats have gravitated toward that issue as a matter of routine, and, as I said, if you make the employer decide between his profitability and the size of his workforce, he will choose his profit every time. That is the mechanism by which a Democratic Party, the self proclaimed party "of the little guy", can actually hurt its people by causing more of them to be layed off.
Now, had the amount of increase been only a "cost of living" adjustment in the true sense, as I allude to above, there would not be a negative impact on employment.
|