Saturday, December 21, 2013

The Unintended Consequences of Raising the Minimum Wage

Economics 101: Minimum Wage  Simple supply and demand.
... "A decrease in the demand for workers (aka: more unemployment). For anyone who has taken an economics class, you know that when demand for something goes down, supply increases. In laymen’s terms: when businesses can’t afford to pay workers, the demand for them decreases, leaving a great number of people unemployed (greater supply). According to an article by Linda Gorman, a senior fellow at the Independence Institute, a “10 percent in crease in the minimum wage would decrease employment of low-skilled workers by 1 or 2 percent.” Pretty self explanatory."
Supply & Demand in Labor Chart
The writer lists these consequences, which liberals do not seem to comprehend:
 
Decreased Numbers of Full-Time Jobs. For those who are lucky enough to keep their jobs, they can expect their number of hours to sink. Because employers can’t pay the increased hourly wage, employers will be relegated to giving employees less hours in an attempt to not pay as much, consequently creating more part-time employment.
Decreased Fringe Benefits. Because employers are now concerned with meeting minimum wage standards, they will be unable to afford fringe benefits on which many employers depend (Insurance, on-the-job training, vacations, etc.). Since many employers would have to transition to part-time employment, employees would not only get fewer hours but also not receive expensive insurance benefits.
Across-The-Board Increased Prices of Goods. Wages are considered an input price, or something that goes into the development/ manufacturing of the product. If wages are higher, the amount of money it costs to manufacture some good increases. In order to close the profit-loss gap, industry will be forced to raise the prices on goods in order to cover their costs. Or, of course, they can cut labor and mechanize which brings us back to the issue of further unemployment.

Hat tip to College Insurrection

The Kings College Student: Hyphenated Americanism Creates a Great Divide

College Insurrection  ... "In an essay for The College Fix, Seaworth reviews the prescient words of President Theodore Roosevelt.
A century ago, hyphenated Americanism was a slur, an epithet, an insult – a means of denigrating immigrants.
President Theodore Roosevelt, in a 1915 speech to the Knights of Columbus (a Catholic fraternal organization founded by an Irish
priest to care for “Irish-Americans” during a stage in American history not far removed from the formation of an anti-Immigrant party, The Know-Nothing Party), stated: “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. … The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”
Teddy Roosevelt’s dire warning has unfortunately come to pass; the very embodiment of the mischief of factions, noted by President James Madison within Federalist No. 10, our government was meant to overcome, and yet so embraced and promoted by the Democrat Party.
Today Hyphenated Americanism is worn as a badge of honor by many, a distinction of sorts that separates Americans by skin pigmentation. Our sole identity as Americans has been divided into racial categories, creating a system in which White is American, and all other races are, and always will be, immigrants to this great nation.
…Like Teddy Roosevelt predicated, hyphenated Americanism is ruining this country.Being an American has nothing to do with what color your skin is, it has nothing to do with where your ancestors are from, it has nothing to do with where you were raised. You are either American, or you are not American.
Hyphens are a societal loophole that perpetuate the notion that America is run by old white men who are native to this country, but not its land. Hyphens feed into the notion that America is a country of racial divides, of racist undertones, and facades of acceptance.
If things have gone too far askew to correct, then perhaps we are looking at the wrong place to discover the roots of this acrimony and the way to equalize it. If the addition of the word American to forms is a fix, we have a duty to allow Americans of all races to declare themselves as race.
…Those who cling to their hyphenated status should join hand in hand with those who bare no hyphens and realize the dreams of Martin Luther King, Jr., putting behind the notions of a man or woman born in this country, or who were lawful immigrants, as anything other than simply American.