When he isn’t standing in an ice cream carton or tweeting about how selfish rich people are for owning three houses like himself, Bernie Sanders talks a bunch about raising the minimum wage to a “livable” wage of fifteen dollars an hour. In fact, Bernie is introducing new legislation to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour by 2024, and it has big Democrat names backing it, including Chuck Schumer.
Even if the Democrats rally around this bill, they will not be able to pass it without Republican support. Here are eight ways to dismantle minimum wage arguments to make sure that doesn’t happen.
1. Raising the minimum wage will cost people their jobs.
Businesses care about their bottom lines, so when they are forced to pay extra per employee, cuts will have to be made. Depending on how easily responsibilities can be shifted to other employees, or how substitutable the labor is in comparison to similar and cheaper automated machines, jobs will be lost in order to offset the costs.
2. The hike will disproportionately hurt small business.
Big businesses are likely to have much more capital to fall back on than small business. This means big businesses will be more financially capable of taking larger short-term costs in the form of investment in mass automated labor in order to cut future labor costs. Small businesses will likely have less opportunities to cut labor costs, and it will be hard for them to keep up with larger businesses and keep the doors open. This is why Walmart has not been opposed to minimum wage legislation in the past.
3. Minimum wage screws younger generations out of their first jobs, and that has nasty implications.
Higher wages encourage managers to hire people who are more experienced and capable of taking on more responsibilities. People who sorely lack these two attributes are youths who have never held a job. It is important for many young people to have the experience of working a low skill job; it builds a work ethic, character, and marketable skills. This experience allows them to better move into higher paying jobs in their future.
4. Minimum wage policy creates illegal labor markets.
Some businesses will try to cheat to get ahead by disobeying minimum wage laws. These practices involve hiring people who are willing to work for less than minimum wage in an under the table dealing. Issues arise when these businesses cheat their own employees out of pay and the employees are unable to go to the authorities because they were employed illegally. This issue would largely go away if the minimum wage did not exist.
5. Wages will not go down if there is no minimum wage.
Left-wingers seem to forget there is a supply component to supply and demand. Laborers will only work for what they are willing to work for; they are not forced to work for less. People are perfectly capable of moving on to another job if the employer won’t compensate them properly. Markets should be left alone to determine wages so companies can be free to buy better labor with higher wages.
6. People already making $15 an hour won’t be happy.
Ill-gotten gains through government coercion will allow any burger-flipping jobber to make as much as many fresh out of college grads.
7. Granting the left’s fantasy that no jobs will be lost, everything will just get more expensive.
If all industries are unable to cut costs, they will just raise prices, causing inflation. Even in their best case scenario the Democrats will have accomplished nothing. That’s what happens when the government artificially raises wages.
8. Ask them to explain why they arbitrarily stop at $15 an hour.
Credit to Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro on this hilarious argument. By leftist logic a one-hundred-dollar minimum wage would be just fantastic, which is nonsense.