Let’s assume for moment that North Carolina’s minimum wage hike was the right thing to do. But that good will could be undercut by the federal government over the course of the next 100 days hours, if you believe George Will, who thinks raising the minimum wage is a bad idea, period:
Because aging liberals, clinging to the moral clarities of their youth, also have Sixties Nostalgia, they are suspicious of states’ rights. But regarding minimum wages, many have become Brandeisians, invoking Justice Louis Brandeis’ thought about states being laboratories of democracy.
But wait. Ronald Blackwell, the AFL-CIO’s chief economist, tells The New York Times that state minimum wage differences entice companies to shift jobs to lower-wage states. So: states’ rights are bad, after all, at least concerning — let’s use liberalism’s highest encomium — diversity of economic policies.
So here’s the next question: If Democrats succeed in raising the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour (even if it’s phased in over two years), would that trump the need for a state earned-income tax credit? Rep. Alma Adams probably doesn’t think so, raising the possibility that both employers and ordinary citizens would get squeezed in the future. Right?
And while we’re on the subject, I discovered this hilarious lead to a -you guessed it- CNN article:
Imagine what it would be like to work without a pay raise for nearly 10 years.
That’s been the plight of some workers who for almost the past decade have been earning the federal minimum wage. Their last pay increase — to $5.15 an hour — came in 1997.
Are they saying what I think they’re saying? I don’t know everything, and I certainly make a few mistakes from time to time. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that absolutely no one individual in this country has been working for minimum wage for the past 10 years. If so, they’ve got problems too big for even the federal government to solve.