Say Anything Blog

Courtesy of my hometown newspaper the Minot Daily News.

Here’s the opening line:

About half of Americans, including more than four in 10 North Dakotans, perceive that a lot of people are struggling to make ends meet in their communities, according to a poll commissioned by the Northwest Area Foundation, Minneapolis.

Four in ten North Dakotans “perceive” that “a lot” of their fellow citizens are struggling to make ends meet.

That’s….scientific.  (I’m being really sarcastic there if you can’t tell.)

The article continues:

Poll results released today show that most North Dakotans say a family of four in their communities would need $30,000 or more to make ends meet, which is higher than the federal government’s poverty threshold of $20,444. More than half said a family of four would need $40,000 or more, up from 38 percent who said the same in a similar poll in December 2005.

Nearly 30 percent of households of all sizes in North Dakota live on less than $40,000 a year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. About 30 percent of North Dakotans also have annual incomes of less than $30,000 a year, compared to 27 percent of Americans overall.

So this isn’t really based on any sort of economic analysis.  Just what North Dakotans think.  How is your average citizen supposed to guess at the wage levels like this?  What keeps one of these poll respondents from throwing numbers out?  “Hmmm…$30,000 sounds about right for a family of four.”  Is that really an informed opinion?  What basis did the poll respondent use for coming up with that figure?

And as for the 30% of households that live on less than $40,000/year…how many of those households have children?  How many of them are just single people living on their own?  How many of them are retirees with no kids and a retirement savings account?  That 30% figure doesn’t really tell us much.

So what’s the purpose of this poll that, frankly, is totally useless?  Why, to give North Dakotans the idea that we’re all living in poverty and need a minimum wage of course.

“When you look at what should be a high priority for elected officials in North Dakota, it’s keeping and attracting businesses that have good-paying jobs,” said Karl Stauber, president of Northwest Area Foundation.

Attracting businesses with good-paying jobs was the top priority listed by North Dakota poll respondents, with 67 percent saying government officials have a great deal of responsibility in that area and 29 percent saying officials have some responsibility.

“The indicator of progress shouldn’t be ’what’s the unemployment rate?’ because of lot of those jobs may not be good-paying jobs,” Stauber said. “The indicator that public officials ought to be tracking is what percentage of the work force is in jobs that pay living wages. Then the question becomes, how do we use state and local policies in areas like education, work-force development and business recruiting to make sure: one, that persons have the skills they need to occupy those good-paying jobs and, two, that the jobs that they are recruiting to North Dakota are actually ones that pay living wages rather than wages that actually end up placing more economic burden on the community.”

More “living wage” nonsense.  Unfortunately, Mr. Strauber and most people who think as he does don’t understand basic supply-and-demand economics.

All jobs are good jobs that drive wages up because each new job takes one worker out of the available work force.  As the available work force gets smaller businesses compete more for workers.  That competition drives up wages.

Thus it doesn’t matter if a business moving into an area is a McDonald’s or a high-tech factory.  Both, proportionally, create jobs and thus both are good for the economy.  Denying that this isn’t so is to deny reality.  We may as well say that up is really down and that the sky is really pink.

The state’s Democrats are, of course, eating this all up, but that’s to be expected.  They’re a bunch of populists who want to make us all feel like we’re victims of low wages so that they can cater to us with legislation like the minimum wage.

I think the only truly interesting part of this poll is this figure buried way at the bottom of Jill Schram’s article:

87 percent are satisfied with the way things are going in their communities, compared to 77 percent nationally.

87%.  That’s a really high number, 10 points above the national average.

North Dakotans are happy.  If you ask them if they should be making more money of course most of them are going to say yes. Who doesn’t want to make more money?  The key is that people are satisfied with things now.  So why get government involved to fix a problem that, frankly, doesn’t even exist in the first place.