"Fair & Balanced" Fox chyron discusses "how" minimum wage "hike will hurt"
July 24, 2009 7:28 am ET by Media Matters staff
From the July 24 edition of Fox News' FOX & Friends:
Previously: Fox chyron declares "minimum wage hike" to be "terrible for all workers!"
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1) By increasing the wage, employers hire fewer workers due to the increased cost..
2) By increasing the wage, more people decide to go back to work, due to the increased incentive.
So it's a double whammy for unemployemnt.
But not really. First off, point (2)... isn't that a GOOD thing? Don't we WANT people to go to work? Isn't that the WHOLE IDEA?! Second, to point (1), how many people earn minimum wage anyway? I've worked a lot of really $#!tty jobs over the years - ice cream scooper, telemarketer, data entry, I mowed lawns, and I even had a manual labor job in a condom warehouse once (no joke!) NONE of the jobs made min wage. The least of them paid ~$8.00/hour, way back when the min wage was $4.25/hr. (Shown how old I am!) (And considering that the income is TAX FREE I even made well over min wage BABYSITTING!) And my friends who waited tables informed me many times that that they made WAY LESS than min wage, as tip-makers are basically exempt from the min wage law! So does this really significanlty impact any huge swath of society? I don't believe it does. Even illegal imigrant labor is often paid more than the min wage.
If someone here has some stats, I'd love to see them. And I may be wrong, but I think we all know that the doom-n-gloom regarding min wage increases is vastly overblown, mostly by very rich men who think the biggest problem facing this country is that very rich men don't have enough money.
But once the increase passes, the widespread doom and gloom doesn't materialize. Of course the doom and gloomers never seem to remember that.
But as an added bonus, an increase in miminum wage means more cash on hand for more people to spend. More spending helps the economy. An increase from time to time is a good thing.