In Honor of Labor Day...

Labor Day has come and gone.  Once again.  And in honor of this annual paean to the "Dirty Jobs" crowd, I thought it only fair and reasonable to take a look at a really dumb, ignorant, and foolish movement that Just. Won't. Die. 

You might have heard that the Left is in full "beast mode" over the "Fight for Fifteen."  That's the little tag line they've given to the Social Justice Warriors' effort to get the "little guy" a "living wage."

Now, you of course know that the minimum wage was never intended to be a "living wage."  It was intended to be a starting wage for a pimply-faced teenager who's working his way through junior college while living in his parent's basement.  Just enough income for him or her (or, in California, "it") to put a couple of gallons of gas in the family truckster so it can trundle on down to the Weinerschnitzel where little Johnnie or Joannie can earn that piddling hourly income.  Just enough to hopefully teach the newfer hire to get to work on time, to learn how to interact with others, to do the job as indicated, and to develop the work-related skills necessary to earn an eventual living. The amount your Elected Leaders have decided to forcibly extricate from employers and redistribute to Johnnie/Joannie in an effort to attempt to justify their overblown salaries.


That of course assumes that the Gummint has any right to determine what constitutes a "minimum wage."  Somehow the "more equal than you" ("Animal Farm") decided that they were going to go to bat for those without the power to determine their own fate by interjecting themselves between the buyer (the employer) and the seller (the employee).  It would seem to me that a "market driven" approach would be to permit the prospective employee and the prospective employer to negotiate between themselves a rate of pay acceptable to each party.  For after all, if the buyer (employer) can't entice the seller (employee) to take the bait and come to work, then that buyer will necessarily have to hike his starting pay higher and higher in order to find a number acceptable to the would-be hire.

But nooooooooo!  They just have to muck things up.  To them, a "market driven" approach would likely be trying to decide which of their electric cars they were going to drive to the local Whole Foods Market to pick up their supply of gluten-free, GMO-free, calorie- and carbohydrate-free, nuts, fruits and berries. 

And just to button things up, it would seem that our elected officials forgot to read the 10th Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which forbids the Feds from doing exactly what they've been doing.  Read it.  You'll be amazed at what those we employ are doing to us in front of our backs. But back to the rant...

The Obama Years so devastated the economy, and destroyed the job market, that many of our neighbors were forced to work at sometimes two or even three min-wage jobs because their normal middle-class job just flat went away.  And so the focus turned to min-wage in an effort to get some of the 93+ million who've been out of the work force, an all-time new record, by the way, back into the traces.

And to that we add the private-sector unions continual loss of members over the past several decades.  Private-sector union membership in this category is at an all-time low at about 6.7%.  That means that the fat cat union bosses are in danger of no longer being able to vacation several times a year to the toniest of locations around the globe, or take their trophy wives (or girl friends!  Or both!) on high-zoot shopping trips and super-scrumptious din-dins at the most expensive shops and eateries.  

So, they went looking for a new target.  Voila!  They sensed an opening at your local McDonalds.  And Jack-In-The-Boxes, and at the local Burger King, but mainly MickeyD's, being the oldest, the largest, and presumably the most manipulable.  

They decided if they put a full-court press on their elected Democrat serfs they could shame the fast food joints into coughing up $15 an hour for their entry level burger flippers. An amount, by the way, which is greater then what we pay our newly-minted soldiers for agreeing to risk their lives to keep us all safe.  And what if they're successful?  They'd swoop in and unionize these newly-rich zombies, and reap the rewards for having done so.  

Don't tell anyone but if successful, these "newly rich" would lose their Earned Income Tax Credits (a check from the Gummint for not making enough money!), and have to start paying income taxes.  The net result, after the loss of bennies and the tax bite, plus confiscatory union dues, would be less take-home than if things were left completely as-is. Not to mention the fact that employers would have no choice but to reduce the hours min-wage-types could work, so as to forestall their possible bankruptcy.

They began protesting 24/7 around MickeyD's Oak Park, IL headquarters, apparently blissfully unaware that franchisers cannot dictate to their franchisees how much to pay their employees. If they did, dear union dweebs, they would be guilty of breaking the law.  Kind of like it being illegal for auto makers to tell their dealers how to price the cars they sell. It's illegal.  Got it?

But there's One Major Factor at the foundation of this whole argument. The Lefties who have never started or operated a business believe down deep in their hearts that every single business owner is a millionaire, and that they should be forced to turn loose of some of their Vast Wealth to enable their flunky employees (and future Democrat voters) to live like college graduates.  They're very simply jealous. Jealous of those who've worked hard and made a success out of their businesses and their lives. They're weapons-grade dumb. Really dumb. And socialistic in the extreme.

So they all got together around a table at one of those top-tier steak houses and decided how deeply to dive into the Korean grocers' pockets. And the guy's who owns the local lumber yard. And the doctor's, and dentist's, and the car salesman's.  And while we're on this subject, let me bring to your attention something you may not have considered before. Ready?  Here goes:

What gives these self-dealing, socialist bozos the right to take from citizen "A" and redistribute it to citizen "B?"

Put another way, why should elected bureaucrats be permitted to literally take, via coercion, and replete with the threats of legal action, something, anything, from that self-same Korean grocer and give it to some dimbulb 25 year-old with a degree in Medieval Lesbian Poetry simply because he just can't find a job?  And then take more if and when the spirit moves them to do so?  And more!

And while we're on the subject, why $15.00 an hour?  Where did that arbitrary number come from?  And who decided it was the hill upon which they would choose to die?  Could that be the exact number that would permit the unions to capture a whole flock of new members?

Against a Fed Min-Wage of $7.25, most states have min-wages in the $7.25 - $9 dollar range.  To make the leap all the way to $15 is extreme! And likely bizz-killing to businesses that operate on thin profit margins. Like 2% - 5%. Like fast food joints.  And supermarkets.  And department stores.  Are we really ready to see vast numbers of businesses close their doors all because we want to redistribute some of their "vast" wealth to losers, with the hoped-for result being the garnering of the recipients votes? And if $15 is good, isn't $20 better? Or $25?  Or how about $50?  Since we're unfairly picking the pockets of that Korean grocer, why not really stiff the bastard by taking everything he owns?  

Santa Monica adopted $15 an hour min-wage a couple of years back. And they've lost over 20% of all their fast food sector as a result.  The Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SeaTac) did the same in 2016. Fully half their restaurants have closed in the terminals and those with plans to open have shelved them.  The same has happened in other locales which have bowed to the wishes of the Far Left. Where will it end?

Maybe we mere tax payers should get together, take the reins of this out-of-control situation, and return the favor. What if we ordinary types decided to require, nay demand, that lawmakers, the self-same scam artists that have so effectively taken control of our pay checks, how much of the lawmakers' salaries should be donated to charity?  I mean, they probably average, ummm, ZERO!  What if we required, say 15%?  Not 7%, not 10%, fifteen percentoids! Something tells moi that they would scream like schoolgirls at a midnight "Carrie" screening.

I've done the numbers, my friends.  A bump in min-wage from $8 to $15 an hour would cost the average MickeyD's about $150,000 a year.  The average MickeyD's franchisee makes about $150,000 a year.  Plus, such an increase would necessarily force a price increase so that $5.99 value meals would become $8.99 no-value meals.  A 20% reduction in sales could therefore be predicted.  And therefore a loss of somewhere around $250,000 a year.  So, this wealth redistribution exercise would remove all the motivation a guy would have to have to both open a franchise (roughly $700,000!), and then work his arse off to run it.  And it would likely put Mickey out of business, and Jack, and Wendy.  Get it?  I thought you would...

Example of this monumental failure?  Sure.  St. Louis City adopted a $13.00 an hour starting on July 1st.  That rate was increased from last year's $9.00, and the $11.00 rate that became effective on January 1st. When they learned that employees' hours worked were going down precipitously as a result, they immediately pushed through a quick re-do, rescinding their previous increase post-haste.  Smart, right?

Smarter than the City of Seattle, which bumped up the min-wage back in 2014 from the already high $9.47 an hour, to $11.00 in 2015, and boosted it up again to a stratospheric $13.00 in 2016.  Seattle was interested in finding out what their rash actions might do to, you know, peoples' incomes (wouldn't you think they would have done that first?), that they commissioned a study by the University of Washington.  Their results indicated that these disruptive and anti-business actions caused hours worked by low-skilled workers to fall by 9.4% during the three quarters when the minimum wage was $13, resulting in a loss of 3.5 million hours worked per calendar quarter.  Those lost hours cost the average min-wage employee $179.00 pr month, while the wage increase would recoup only $54.00 of this loss, leaving a net loss of $125.00 per month (6.6%)!

If only workers were getting hurt it would be bad enough. But businesses were getting hammered, as one would expect. Results from the study also indicated that business operating profits were down more than 25% and closures had skyrocketed more than 9%!  Not good, my friends.  And businesses started leaving Seattle in droves, relocating to the suburbs so as to avoid getting screwed by their Leftist overlords in the City Council.

I mean, what do these bozos expect?  Do they really believe that business owners will just bend over and take it up the kazoo when law makers make dumb laws?  Obviously not...

And so, dear readers, remember that those who attempt to use threats, coercion and the heavy hand of governmental intrusion to reorder economic realities in an effort to feather their own nests are the enemies of freedom!  And they should be treated as such.  

Oh yeah, by the way, I am a graduate economist and actually know in this one, rare instance what the Hell about which I'm actually talking (with apologies to Yoda).  So if you are usually persuaded to disregard the pronunciamentos spewing forth from The Chuckmeister's gargantuan intellect, choose to wrap your collective brains around this one.  It's actually rooted in reality...

Of course, the otherwise-unemployable dimbulb politicians in Sacramento, and other Deep Blue state capitols, can sleep well knowing that the havoc they wreck, if successful, will likely result in hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies and a huge bump in unemployment, and quite possibly a full-blown recession.  But that's okay.  They're probably too damn dumb to notice.  And the people to put them there, and keep sending them back, are as well...