Editor,
To Congressmen Larsen: Increasing the minimum wage is the worst thing you could do to an economy struggling to gain traction and recover. What absolutely slays me is supporters of an increased minimum wage’s inability to answer this simple question: If raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour won’t harm employers and is good for business, why don’t we just make the minimum wage $40 per hour, or $100 per hour for that matter? Like so many other positions you take, you have this one dead wrong.
Requiring a business to pay for a low-skill job what it could otherwise outsource or automate will result in increased unemployment among youth, minorities, elderly, and disabled.
Your argument that there are too many college graduates working for minimum wage demonstrates this truth. Despite all your bailouts and social engineering, you, Obama, and the U.S. Senate have done nothing but harm our economy and reduce the number of good quality jobs, replacing the once heralded American work ethic with American apathy and dependence. These actions will continue to put more people into poverty with far fewer people proudly earning their way to prosperity.
What’s worse, minimum wage harms the poor most of all. A low skill, low wage position was once viewed as a foot in the door, an opportunity for a young or inexperienced worker to get a start. Now it is treated as a career path and, like all the other entitlement programs, does nothing but undermine the value of hard work and destroy an individual’s chance at upward mobility. You’ve incentivized the wrong behavior under the guise of fairness and equality. Rather than providing an environment in which individuals at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder have a chance to climb to the next rung, you’ve made it just comfortable enough for them to remain at the bottom, knowing that a voter with their hand out to you is a voter you control.
With King Obama in office, you may actually succeed in getting this through, but like Obamacare, you’re tying the knot by which your party will surely hang.
JASON JOINER
Coupeville
