Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I'd like give my answer to the question the Daily Show asked Peter Schiff, and then deceptively
edited his answer:
"Give me a picture of a person whose work would be worth $2 an hour."
Think of someone who probably hasn't made the best choices in life. He partied in high
school and barely passed. He goofed around instead of going to college. Maybe he got
in with a bad crowd, and ended up serving some jail time. He might have even gotten
into drugs and had to clean himself up. So, here he is, no education, no work experience,
no references, trying to turn his life around, he needs someone to take a chance on him.
And make no mistake: anyone who hires him WOULD be taking a chance, with a criminal
record, a drug history, no information at all about what kind of worker he is...with
a Minimum Wage at $10.10 or even $7.25, any job he applies for is going to have dozens
if not hundreds of other people applying for it, people who DON'T have criminal records,
people who DON'T have a history of using drugs, people with MUCH better work history and references,
people who have a better GPA on their record or even a college education, even if it's
just two years at a community college, really now, who would YOU hire? Don't even TRY to
lie and say you'd be nice to him and hire him--you KNOW you wouldn't! You'd hire one
of the dozens of more qualified candidates, and if you didn't you'd be a complete idiot
and if that's at all indicative of how you run your business you won't be in business
much longer!
But what if there were no Minimum Wage? What if he had the ability to undercut the competition?
All those other guys are demanding $7/hr, but he'll work for just 2! NOW don't you have
more of an incentive to hire him? To take that chance? After all, you can always fire
him if it doesn't work out, and you haven't lost that much money in the process. So you
hire him, and a month or two later when you realize how valuable he is, because he really
has turned his life around and he's actually a pretty good employee, you're going to want
to give him a raise to keep him. Otherwise your competition will *** him up for $3
or $4 an hour. And after a year or so, he'll be making a wage very close to what other
people doing the same job are making.
Here's a dirty little secret about the Minimum Wage: it's actually very rare for someone
to stay on it for very long. Every year, there's x-percent of the workforce making the minimum
wage--and it's not much, I don't think it's EVER been above 5%, even if you just look
at fast food jobs or whatever, right now I think it's more like 3%. (Which itself debunks
the statist argument: if employers are all greedy and will only pay people the bare minimum,
why isn't that number much larger?) But here's the effect I'm talking about: each year, 3%
of workers may be making Minimum Wage, but it's a DIFFERENT 3% each year! Because it's
mostly young people entering the work force for the first time, or people re-entering
the work force after an absence, which is why you have more women working Minimum Wage
because in our society it's usually the women who take a year or two off when there's a
new baby in the house, but by the next year they'll have gotten a raise, and so by and
large Minimum Wage jobs actually represent new jobs that are being created.
So our guy just needs someone who'll take a chance on him for a few months so he can
get himself into that position, and the ability to undercut the competition is vitally important
here, and that's exactly what Minimum Wage takes away from him. So to those of you who
are still in favor of a Minimum Wage, this is my question for you:
Why don't people like him deserve a second chance?