A number of the players who were heavily invested in last year’s gubernatorial rematch between Gov. Chris Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi subscribe to the notion that the beginning of the end for Rossi, who had appeared to have closed the gap on Gregoire in September polling, was the night he said, during a debate hosted by the Association of Washington Business in Blaine, that he was open to considering a scaling back of the minimum wage for teenagers in Washington state.
Two weeks later the Rossi campaign suffered an embarrassing setback when Kittitas County Republican Party Chair Matt Manweller, a CWU political science professor, unleashed a tirade outside of an Ellensburg campaign rally, calling supporters of Washington state’s minimum wage “dumber than a post.”
Well, even without their guy Rossi in the governor’s mansion, the good politicians of Central Washington aren’t giving up on it.
State Rep. Mike Armstrong (R-Wenatchee) introduced a bill today that would allow state employers to pay 15 year olds 85% of the Federal minimum wage. Today that wage is $6.55, which would make the Armstrong’s proposed 15-year old wage $5.57.
Washington state’s current minimum wage is $8.55, making this would-be $3.00 decrease even steeper than the $1.50 proposed by Rossi last fall.
“When I was a teenager, I worked in the orchards around Wenatchee picking apples, cherries and other fruit,” Armstrong said in a press release, recalling the halcyon days of the early 1970s. “A training wage would help to further expand these opportunities for your young people and be a savings to farmers struggling to pay for harvest and stay in business.”
In other words, think of the children!
The bill was referred to the House Commerce and Labor Commmittee, where one can assume it will die a slow death. Committee chair Rep. Steve Conway (D-Tacoma), whose House website lists his top legislative priority as “family wage jobs”, did not return a call seeking comment about the bill’s fate.
Ironically, this was only one of two bills introduced today regarding 15 year olds, whose political stock is at an all-time high on this Groundhog’s Day. Sen Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Seattle) brought a bill to the Senate floor that would ban children under the age of 16 from hunting in Washington state without adult accompaniment.
Poor kids.
If the Democrats get their way, they won’t be able to work or hunt. How will they ever feed their families? Good thing they can still get their contraceptives without much hassle, right?
Using the Minneapolis Fed Inflation Calculator $5.57 in 2008 would be equivelent to $1.08 in 1972. Sweet deal, slaves you don’t have to feed or house.
Where is McGavick and his $2.18-an-hour minimum wage in eastern Washington Republicans’ greatest hour of need? All these minimum-wage proposals floating around and not a peep from McGavick! He took Safeco’s $18 million and walked with it into a comfortable retirement while leaving his cheap labor cohorts twisting in the wind. I knew they shouldn’t have trusted that guy.
Manweller, Guzzo, Sharansky, Miller, pudge, the pooper – the right wing in this state has some WEIRD people in it!
“When I was a teenager”
Good grief.
@3 “pudge, the pooper”
They dig their own hole, don’t they? They now have all the makings of an insignificant minor political party with influence in about a half dozen inconsequential states and about the same amount of unpopulated counties in Washington.
Take A Number, Please!
I know all you teenagers are eager to apply for ski area jobs paying $5.57 an hour for a 6-hour shift that require commuting 50 miles each way with $4 gas — no shoving to get to the head of the line please! Everyone who wants to apply will be interviewed! We promise!
I wonder how many apples rotted on the trees last fall because eastern Washington growers couldn’t get workers because of high gas prices and lack of on-site housing?
Guess what, Republicans! When it costs more to work than the workers get paid nobody works!
Of course, I wouldn’t work anyway. Why should I? Work is taxed 3 times as much as capital gains and dividends, and inheritances aren’t taxed at all, at least not in any amount I’ll ever inherit! Of all the ways of getting money in America, working is the worst of all! Workers are disrespected and looked down on. They’re jerked around, abused, lied to, and unappreciated. They’re overworked, underpaid, and put in dangerous situations where they can get hurt or even killed. They’re downsized, outsourced, transferred, dehumanized — but rarely if ever promoted. They’re put in cubicles or windowless rooms, yelled at, cursed, groped, bullied, and laid off. They get all the work and none of the profits from what they produce. Why the hell would anyone want to work? I sure don’t want to work. I don’t lift a paw to do a fucking thing! I get paid for doing absolutely nothing, and I get a favorable tax rate for producing absolutely nothing! In other words, I live like a Republican now!
Things are so desperate for eastern Washington’s cheap labor conservatives they’re reduced to trolling playgrounds for child labor. They shoulda voted Democrat!
When I was 17 I had a high school diploma and worked both in grape vineyards and a burger joint to pay my way through school. My meager 1969 minimum wage paid my rent, food bill and school expenses in a large city away from my rural roots. This bill is anti-youth in favor of big business disguised as a benefit to young people. What a sham! You can’t pull yourself up by the bootstraps when these guys keep cutting your bootstraps off.
–Johnboy
@9 Isn’t it funny how business always raises prices faster than wages? But the chickens finally came home to roost. They cut themselves off at the knees. Now they have no customers.
For those of you smart enough NOT to get your political opinions from an uneducated blogger….enjoy. For those of you who DO get your opinons for this page…stop here…you won’t understand any of it anyway.
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For the past 15 years I have been trying to educate students and citizens about the fallacy of minimum wage laws. With students, I have been very successful. With citizens at large…not so much. All one has to do is read the posts at Effin Unsound and Horses Ass to see that most liberals lack a fundamental understanding of simple economics. But, with my recent confrontation with a Democratic heckler at a political event, I inadvertently pushed the issue back on the radar screen. Therefore, I have a responsibility to “give it one more try.”
My good friends over at Effin Unsound have referred to my “middle school understanding of free markets.” Well, I can tell you that my middle school did not teach economics. But, luckily for me, my H.S. did, as did Whitman College where I got my Economics degree, as did the University of Oregon where I got my Ph.D. So I admit that I don’t have the full understanding of economics that a blogger might have, but I hope the fact that I have published a few scholarly articles in peer reviewed journals and a textbook or two might someday give me the insight one garners from reading the Seattle Times and then blogging about it at Horses Ass.
Let’s start with some basic questions for my friends on the left.
Can you name a single product, service or commodity that we buy more of when the price goes up? This is an important question. If you cannot give me a single answer, the debate is over. Labor is a commodity/service. All research tells us that as prices go up, we buy less of the product—labor included. So, unless you can find an exception to this rule, one would have to conclude that an increase in wages would decrease demand for labor. I’ll give you a hint. There IS a product that is an exception to this rule, but I’ll let my blogger friends spend all day Goggling to try and find it themselves.
Now, the ignorant response I usually get from liberals is that increases in the minimum wage attract more people to the labor pool and therefore the minimum wage creates jobs. Ummmm. Wrong. An increase in the supply of labor does not increase the demand for labor. They are independent forces. For example, increasing the number of Pintos in the world will not increase the number of Pinto’s sold. It will simply increase the number of Pintos sitting on a back lot. Or, look at 8-track tapes. We can increase the supply all we want. That won’t make people buy them. We can fill up warehouses of 8-track tapes, but supply does not create its own demand (Say’s Law to the contrary). So, yes, minimum wage laws WILL attract more people to the labor force (liberals have that right) but without a concurrent increase in the demand, we actually create a larger glut of workers which has a DOWNWARD pressure on the price of labor (wages).
Now some over at Horses Ass have actually argued that there are “umpteen studies showing that increases in the minimum wage adds jobs.” Wrong again. There are many studies that show a correlation between increases in the minimum wage and job creation. But, as any first year grad student knows, correlation is not causation. What these studies show that there have been times when both wages and job creation have grown at the same time. What these studies are identifying is an intervening or third variable that is causing BOTH. For example, we could run regressions showing that as coffee sales increase so does the sale of sweaters. Now the intellectually challenged may conclude that coffee sales CAUSE sweater sales. The more nuanced among us know that a third variable (falling temperatures) cause both coffee and sweater sales to increase. All of these studies concluding that increases in the minimum wage create jobs are simply identifying control variables that are causing both.
Even if I can get liberals to understand the above logic, they usually come back with the argument that even if the minimum wage doesn’t create jobs, at least there is no evidence that it KILLS jobs. OK. Let’s debunk that myth too. I you believe that increasing the min wage from $5 to $9 will have no impact on hiring practices, then why stop there? Increasing the wage to $15 should have no effect either. Heck, under this logic, increasing the wage to $50 should have no impact. If you keep following this logic eventually liberals come to see their own mistake before I have to point it out.
Now some counter that increases in the min wage don’t have any effect at lower levels, but admit they would if they reached my hypothetical $50. Even if that were true (and it’s not) where would that tipping point be? Does anyone at Horses Ass know? I don’t. Economists don’t. No one knows. Gee…maybe that is why we have markets to figure this out.
Now, here is where it gets a little complicated. Some on the left argue that increases in the minimum wage does not kill jobs because labor is a necessity. In some respects they are right in the short term. There are some goods in the world that are “unitary inelastic” which means they are so necessary that changes in price have zero effect on buying them. A good example would be insulin. It doesn’t matter how the price of insulin changes, diabetics will still buy. But labor is NOT unitary inelastic. It is highly inelastic, but a better analogy would be gasoline. Gas is a necessity and when prices go up, we still buy ABOUT the same amount in the SHORT RUN. But, in the long run, we carpool, buy Priuses, and develop alternative fuels. In the long run, gas becomes more elastic. Labor is the same way. If wages go up tomorrow, there will not be layoffs the following day. But, in the long run labor IS elastic just like most goods. We find substitutes. In the labor market, substitutes include outsourcing or developing new technology, or creating new procedures that require less labor. We may not see the effect immediately, but they will show up.
That’s about it for now. I hope some of the people who learn their econ 101 from Goldy and The Him will take some time to read this. Education is powerful thing…even for liberals.
@5 don’t forget the free skiing!!!
@7
Thank you Roger for demonstrating so well the absolute victim mentality of a liberal mind…
“humph, it’s not fair! (stomps feet in fit) there are people who make more money than me, are more popular than me, smarter than me, have less fleas than me… not fair, not fair not fair…..wages should be fair!, workers should all make the same salary…we should all dress the same, look the same and all worship at the closest government office”
“I wouldn’t work anyway. Why should I?”
I think the real question is, who’d hire you.
“snark” Why not make the minimum wage $35.00/hr? “/snark”
So, Manweller, is your Phd in economics? I didn’t think so. What was it in? Oh, political science. But you made it seem like it was in economics. So much for intellectual honesty.
Started out my career as an economist…switched to political science later. Yep…I mess it up every once in a while.
Is that the best you got Spike? Do you have an INTELLECTUAL response to my post…or just more silly blogging-type responses where you think you are being clever?
Matt: You are not being challenged because the HA loonies can’t get their morning shot of warm man made kook-aid from a George Soros funded site to attack you. Without that, they have no direction, no guidance, and no retort.
Spike is low on the HA mental scale, about equal to spyder. Liberalism is a mental disorder.
This from a 2006 Economic Policy Institute paper that explains far better than I could the value of minimum wage.
http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/bp178/
Conclusion
Since the last federal minimum wage increase in 1997, state minimum wage increases have provided an important boost to the incomes of low-wage workers and their families. These states have provided a testing ground for the exaggerated claims of harm made by minimum wage opponents. If the minimum wage had substantial negative effects on the economy or the well-being of low-wage workers, then it would have been observed in these states. The reality is that the states with higher minimum wages have not seen ill effects. This has been shown both in rigorous econometric studies and in assessments of broad economic indicators. These findings confirm what has been seen in a variety of other economic analyses of the minimum wage.
While the findings of economists on the minimum wage are certainly not unanimous, the weight of opinion has clearly been moving toward a belief that the minimum wage improves the lives of low-wage workers without adverse consequences. Even, however, if the negative findings of some researchers were to be accurate, minimum wage workers as a whole would be better off, as the temporary losses of the few would be far more than offset by the wage gains of the many. The positive effects of the minimum wage are difficult to dispute. The minimum wage sets a floor for the value of work and lifts the living standards of low-wage workers.