Minimum Wage alternative – Moderates United

Minimum Wage laws have been an unmitigated disaster in inner city ghettos, having tripled unemployment rates among black teens, making it harder for them to get the first job that leads to the second job. In discussing this over at my favorite website, it occurred to me that we could age-tier Minimum Wage laws. I don’t agree in principle with them, but if we are to have them, we can do them more intelligently. We can DROP the rate by say 50% for anyone under 21, but RAISE it for anyone over 21 who has at least a 3 year work history. This would be better than what we have now.

Here is copy of the case I made:

I am not going to back off my contention that minimum wage increases
unemployment, but I am going to qualify it: among unskilled, first time
workers. As a general rule, virtually everyone who has been working
more than a couple years is not going to be paid minimum wage, so what
it is is relevant only for unskilled workers. Managers at Burger King
make well above minimum wage.

First off, here are some statistics: We
have gotten so used to seeing unemployment rates of 30 percent or 40
percent for black teenage males that it might come as a shock to many
people to learn that the unemployment rate for 16- and 17-year-old black
males was just under 10 percent back in 1948.
Let me put a concrete case in front of you. As things stand
currently in inner cities, some 40% of black kids are unemployed, and
realistically will stay that way for some time, with all the negative
social consequences that follow.

Let’s take a kid, Mike, who is 17, has never had a job, dropped out
of high school, and who was raised by a single mother working two jobs.
He has nothing to do all day but watch TV, and wonder if he should
start selling drugs to earn some money to chase girls.

If businesses could hire him for, say $5 an hour, then they would
grab him in a heartbeat. It’s a great deal for them, since he’s cheap,
and it’s a much better deal for him than what he has now.

The “liberal” argument is both that he should not be allowed to work
for that wage, since it is “exploitative”, and that if he just votes
Democrat he will eventually be taken care of.

But he won’t be taken care of. Unemployment rates in the inner
cities have been astronomical for 50 years. This is in large measure
why there is so much violence there.

My question, then, is if people are willing to work for lower wages,
why are the choices between either not hiring that person, or hiring
someone who WILL work for $5 overseas? Why not let Mike make his own
decision?

OF COURSE it makes “liberals” feel good. But is feeling good the
goal, or is it helping people? I would argue that the part of wisdom
and compassion is the latter.

Minimum wage laws are very destructive, but, as Sowell points out:

This was not the first or the last time that liberals did
something that made them feel good about themselves, while leaving havoc
in their wake, especially among the poor whom they were supposedly
helping.

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