The White House is taking to Twitter in its appeal for an increase in the federal minimum wage. On Monday, the @WhiteHouse Twitter account posted a graphic touting their “#RaiseTheWage” campaign:
Unfortunately, the proposed minimum wage raise could come at enormous cost.
This year, the Congressional Budget Office released a report stating that raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 would help bring 900,000 people above the poverty level–at a loss of over 500,000 American jobs by 2016.
This policy would also cause the income of people who remain unemployed (or who are one of the 500,000 Americans whose employers are forced to eliminate jobs) to fall dramatically, and make it more difficult for low-wage workers to gain employment. The net effect on the budget deficit over the next decade remains unclear.
The CBO report contains an interesting tidbit about the interaction between a minimum wage increase, and dependency on federal benefits to make ends meet:
As a group, workers with increased earnings would pay more in taxes and receive less in federal benefits of certain types than they would have otherwise. However, people who became jobless because of the minimum-wage increase, business owners, and consumers facing higher prices would see a reduction in real income and would collectively pay less in taxes and receive more in federal benefits than they would have otherwise.
Lost jobs, lower wages, and new names on the welfare rolls? No wonder only 13 states have chosen to raise their minimum wage.
The crux of the problem with federally-mandated programs is that they prevent states from doing what the states are meant to do–act as “laboratories” for policy experiments.
The failure of Obamacare, the entitlement crisis, and the job-killing overreach of the EPA are proof positive that the big government experiment has failed. Now, the Obama Administration is attempting to jam through another mandate that would force half a million Americans to throw themselves at the mercy of the federal government.
There’s a reason why President Obama’s approval rating just hit an all-time low of 41%–maybe it’s because the American people have finally begun to realize that the man they elected to lead the country has no real desire to see that country–or its families–succeed.
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