Say Anything Blog

Today the minimum wage goes up again, and you’ll hear from grandstanding politicians and leftist reporters that this amounts to a raise for the “working poor” but the reality it that it’s little more than an increase in the tax on low-wage workers.

Because that’s really all the minimum wage is.  And far from helping those low-wage workers out it will do little more than cause a lot of them to get fired, and maybe cause a few small businesses to go under as well.

Think about it.  Who employs low wage workers more than anyone else?  Is it the much-maligned corporate giants like Wal-Mart?  No.  Wal-Mart doesn’t pay a single employee in its retail empire anything close to the minimum wage.  The employers who employ low-wage workers tend to be small businesses.  Independent gas stations.  Mom and pop grocery stores.  They can’t complete with the bigger companies on the prices of goods and services so they cut costs by making do with lower wage workers.

Until, that is, a bunch of meddling politicians come along and jack up the price of those workers.  Then the small businesses cope by either cutting costs (read: firing some of the workers so they can afford to pay the rest) or going out of business.  Which, in turn, means less competition for those corporate giants the supporters of the minimum wage like to hate so much.

So cheer the minimum wage hike if you want, but realize also that it’s not doing anything good for our nation’s low wage workers or the people who employ them.