What Edwards and his allies will never acknowledge is that most workers who are hired at the minimum wage fairly quickly earn raises if they are diligent in their jobs. Few people remain at the minimum wage for years, and if they do, it’s because their productivity does not warrant paying them more. Even if Edwards could legislate a raise for them, it wouldn’t be long before we’d hear him wimpering that the new minimum wage is not enough and must be raised further.
Johnny Edwards is a lawyer, but undoubtedly knows enough economics to realize that when anything is priced to high, people won’t buy it — including labor. He has to know that raising the minimum wage prices the least productive and experienced people out of the job market. Nevertheless, it’s too good a political issue to abandon, so we can expect him to keep on wringing his hands about the federal government’s failure to do enough to help “the working poor.” It gets him votes from the ignorant rich.
