Why Artificially Raising The Minimum Wage Always Hurts Minimum Wage Workers

It is not that often that I write super obvious titles like that. Almost all of you, if not all, would read that title and mentally say: “no duh!” because that might as well say: “Socialism Is Bad”. It’s just that obvious that cities and states artificially (and I’ll get to why I’m specifically using that word in a moment) raising the minimum wage to any rate ends up hurting the very people such raises are supposed to help.
 
But why exactly am I talking about this? Because recently, New York City has seen “the greatest plunge in restaurant jobs in almost 20 years”, which comes as a result of New York’s Fast Food Wage Board making a “recommendation” to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour back in 2015.
 
A survey from the New York City Alliance, published by the end of 2018, found that “76.50% of full service restaurant respondents reduced employee hours, and 36.30% eliminated jobs in 2018… 75% of limited service restaurant respondents report that they will reduce employee hours, and 53.10% will eliminate jobs in 2019 as a result of mandated wage increases that took effect on December 31, 2018… When the tip wage increased 50% in 2015, and since doubled, annual employment growth dropped from 6.67% to less than 1% as of November 2018.”
 
But wait, there’s more. Back in mid February, economist Mark Perry from the American Enterprise Institute wrote:
 
“December 2018 restaurant jobs were down by almost 3,000 (and by 1.64%) from the previous December, and the 2.5% annual decline in March 2018 was the worst annual decline since the sharp collapse in restaurant jobs following 9/11 in 2001… it usually takes an economic recession to cause year-over-year job losses at NYC’s full-service restaurants, so it’s likely that this is a ‘restaurant recession’ tied to the annual series of minimum wage hikes that brought the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour at the end of last year.”
 
And it’s not just New York City that is getting hurt by these wage hikes. Back in August of 2016, Seattle was in much the same spot when they raised their own minimum wage. The same thing happened to San Francisco, when they raised their minimum wage, leading more and more restaurants to close and workers to subsequently lose their jobs.
 
Altogether, having the government raising the minimum wage is a terrible thing for the people it’s supposed to help.
 
There is no “livable wage” when the effects of artificially raising the minimum wage are that people get reduced work hours, lose their jobs altogether, or entire businesses close down to try and offset costs.
 
Never mind the fact that a minimum wage was never meant to be a “livable” wage. It literally can’t be made into a livable wage, especially by the government!
 
Now, I mentioned earlier that I would explain just what I mean when I talk about artificially raising the minimum wage. I’m really talking strictly in an economics sense.
 
The government forcing a wage increase is an artificial way to have wages increase. And as we can plainly see, it only brings pain to those it affects. Businesses have to reduce employee hours or outright lay people off because they can’t afford to pay their low-skill workers such high wages. If a business hopes to survive, it has to do that sort of thing under such poor economic policies.
 
However, I am not against raising the minimum wage altogether because there is an economically sound way of doing it. It’s what we saw soon after the GOP tax cuts were put into place. Businesses like Walmart, in multiple locations nationwide, were gaining so much money from heavily reducing the corporate tax rates that they decided to raise the minimum wage of their workers to that magic number the Left wants to force on everyone: $15 an hour.
 
This is the economically sound, pro-market, and real way to raise the minimum wage. If a business can afford to pay its employees more, it doesn’t have much reason not to. So the minimum wage worker gets a nifty little raise, the same wage the Left claims to want for people, AND their work hours are not cut, thus letting them make more money than they otherwise would have AND they are most definitely not laid off AND the business they work for can continue growing more and more, allowing its employees to also be paid more and more.
 
If anyone wonders why there is any sort of “pay gap” between the NBA and the WNBA is because the WNBA’s revenue sits at $60 million according to Forbes, while the NBA’s revenue at the end of the 2017/18 season sat at just over $8 BILLION. The NBA shares with its players 50% of their revenue while the WNBA shares only 25% of their revenue because the WNBA makes far less money than the NBA does.
 
What I’m trying to say here is that a business that makes more money is able to pay its employees more money than a business that makes less money. That’s just common sense. It’s logic. The CFO of a huge company like Microsoft, Apple, Intel, etc. will make far more money than the CFO of a smaller business. The same is the case for many of the lower-earning and lower-ranking jobs.
 
So if a business can make more money, it can afford to pay its employees more money as well, and it almost always will do that, lest the employees resign and work for another company that will pay them more money.
 
This is the capitalist and only real good way to raise the minimum wage. The socialist way of raising the minimum wage, in which the government forces companies to pay its low-skill employees more money, is how businesses close and employees are either left with fewer work hours, so they don’t make more money anyway (and that’s the best case scenario) or are outright laid off because the businesses can’t afford to pay such a salary for a job literally anyone can do.
 
The socialist way of raising the minimum wage is what happens in liberal cities like Seattle, New York City, San Francisco and anywhere it’s tried. It’s one of the many reasons socialism doesn’t work. It’s an ideology that requires perfection in order to work.
 
On paper, the idea of raising the minimum wage is not bad. But we don’t live on paper. We live in the real world. And in the real world, real world things like profit margins and offsetting costs have to be factored in. As a result, if a business can’t afford the minimum wage hikes, it simply will reduce its work force, leaving people to not make any more money than they otherwise would at best and completely out of a job at worst.
 
Advocating for having the government raise the minimum wage is completely devoid of information and common sense.
 
Of course, the point of advocating for the government to raise the minimum wage isn’t that people are able to have “liveable” wages, but so that people DON’T HAVE liveable wages and have to rely on the government to pay for things.
 
The point of having the government raise minimum wage is that people DO GET FIRED so they have to rely on the government.
 
When news came out that businesses like Walmart were WILLINGLY raising their minimum wage, Democrats either were completely silent or were outright furious. They don’t actually care about the people and whether or not they have a liveable wage. In fact, they’d rather they would not have a decent wage so that they can fall prey to the government’s crippling social programs.
 
It further goes to show that the Left does not care one little bit about people, particularly those they say they support. They couldn’t care less about anyone other than themselves and their own power, so they advocate for things that will screw the little guy and force him to depend largely or solely on the government.
 
Proverbs 28:1-5
“The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion. When a land transgresses, it has many rulers, but with a man of understanding and knowledge, its stability will long continue. A poor man who oppresses the poor is a beating rain that leaves no food. Those who forsake the law praise the wicked, but those who keep the law strive against them. Evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the Lord understand it completely.”
 
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