Timothy Birdnow

I usually love Josh Hawley but this is simply stupid.

Josh Hawley introduces bill to raise federal minimum wage to $15.

If there is a minumum wage at all (and there shouldn't be; it's none of government's business and appears nowhere in the enumerated powers) it should be at the state level,not the federal.

Minimum wage hikes cost jobs, especially for the young or the poor. Hawley should know that.

Not sure what he's thinking but he needs to get his head realigned.

The market is the best way to determine wages, not some one-size-fits-all law. Give a guy ten bucks an hour no matter how poorly he performs and you simply drag everything down. You also encourage employers to seek new ways to do things to eliminate the dead weight. That's why fast food places now require customers to use kiosks to self-order. Before they are through we'll have to cook the food ourselves and package it and say "thank you, come again" to grab a burger.

That was because of minimum wage hikes. Time was a young kid took your order, but McDonalds isn't hiring someone who needs to be trained and who may not show up. Easier to just dump his job on the customers.

This is how service goes down all around. Employees who now loaf off wouldn't have had they been in an adjustable pay scale and could make more if they performed better. This is exactly why the Soviet economy went belly-up; nobody working, everybody finding ways to slack off because they were guaranteed a job and guaranteed the same pay no matter how they performed.

As Archie Bunker once stated (quite brilliantly, though they tried to make him sound ridiculous) "what's the point of a man working hard all his life if he's going to end up equal". Archie was right.

So now even our political champions are going down this road.

I've always worried a bit about Hawley, ever since he let Prosecutor Kim Gardner wager her campaign against Missouri Governor Eric Greitens. Gardner broke multiple laws and Hawley was the Attorney General then; he could have shut her down. He didn't do it because of political considerations and nothing more. Greitens had been a Democrat and the Missouri GOP hated him for taking the party away, just as the national GOP hated Trump for the same thing.

So I've always kept one eye on Mr. Hawley. He pleasantly surprised me, but this appears to be a case of neotany, of backward evolution. He really should know better.

I suppose Hawley thinks that if we raise the minimum wage we will collect more in tax income. But that will only slow down economic growth. The businesses employing the minimum wagers won't have money to gorw. In the end this will probably COST  revenue.

What fools we mortal be!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:28 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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