Orig Post Date: 2013..
Source: Steve Chapman on Creators.com
My Comments:
An extremely accurate assessment of the effects of an increase in the minimum wage.
I can remember the high school kids that were hired for summer work at the plant that I was working at in Georgia back in the mid 70s. When the minimum wage went up to $3.35 in 1981 the number of those summer hires went way down.
Another place where this effect really showed up was at filling stations. I can remember making just over $1/hr at a station I worked at one summer. We had more summer workers on the lot than we had gas pumps. When a customer drove up we pumped their gas, checked the fluids under their hood, cleaned their windows, and it asked vacuumed their floor mats and checked the air in their tires. All this with a smile and Green Stamps. As the minimum wage ramped up over the years the number of filling station workers ramped down until with today's minimum wage we have to do all of that for ourselves and those jobs are no more.
I can also remember the large number of migrant farm workers that came into town to help harvest the potato crop. Then the government started to ramp up the wages that they had to be paid. One of my uncles was the first local farmer to buy a machine that took 4 men to operate but it dug, picked up, and graded potatoes by size and dumped them onto wagons to be hauled back to the barn for bagging. 4 men + that machine replaced several hundred migrant workers and removed the need for housing them.
The net result in each case was fewer jobs. This has been documented time and again but our professional politicians never seem to grasp this. Too many of them, our current president included have never had to run a business and make sure that business could make its payroll. It's obvious that too many of them don't understand operating within one's means and on a realistic budget.
W.C.
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