Fox News’ Neil Cavuto is one of the biggest opponents against raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour. Today, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed it in law and Cavuto had on one of the founders of the Fight For $15 movement, Naquasia LeGrand to discuss the horrible consequences that may fall upon the poors…
Only one presidential candidate this election season supported a $15/hr minimum wage.
As I think I’ve written before, that’s really complicated. If you raise it in a rural area, you may end up pushing people out of eligibility for food stamps, Section 8, subsidized daycare, etc. It’s not easy to anticipate all the ripple effects and as we’ve seen, Bernie’s not big on getting into the policy weeds.
Everything’s complicated. Raising the minimum wage to $15.00 is not, but all the impacts and unintended consequences are very complicated. Most of us are not going to do a high level economic analysis, completed with unintelligible jargon, charts, graphs, and complicated equations. Most of us will have to more or less intuit the outcomes from second and third level data.
So, here’s mine. Hillary was on the board of Walmart, which rails against social programs while being subsidized by tax payers because they pay such low wages that their employees are eligible for food stamps and Medicaid, and public housing, and subsidized day care. Hmmmm. Piketty, Baker, Stiglitz, Galbraith, Reich, and Bill Black and many other “lefty” economists have endorsed Bernie’s economic plan, Krugthulu has endorsed Hillary’s. Hmmmm. Hillary and her superpacs accept large donations from US based multinational corporations (and their employees, lobbyists and other shady entities, that’s complicated too) which spend hundreds of millions of dollars avoiding taxes, moving their manufacturing operations to other countries to take advantage of survival level wages, and lobbying for work visas to admit tech workers who work for less, while highly qualified US workers can’t find work. HMmmmm.
Yes, I’ll grant you, it’s complicated.
But props to Neil Cavuto for doing the bidding of his masters, even to the point of making an ass out of himself. (Robots making your burgers at McDonald’s? Gee, Neil, all you do is read the news. Maybe you should worry about being automated out of a job yourself. If you think insights are the value add you bring to the table, I would ask if your bosses are wondering if insights like “burgerbots” are worth the added expense.)
In any case, good boy. Maybe there will be an extra treat in your dish tonight.
The idea of a single national minimum wage, or even statewide minimum wages, is badly flawed. MW’s will only work well if pegged to the local cost of living. Silicon Valley and San Francisco need higher MW’s than Sacramento, which needs a higher one than Bakersfield, which needs a higher one than Little Rock, which needs a higher one than Bentonville AR,, and so forth. Any MW’s that aren’t based on regional living costs are sure to be problematic.