THE MINIMUM WAGE

From the Huffington Post courtesy of BuzzFlash:

Unfortunately, this overwhelming support for raising the minimum wage does not extend to most of corporate America, which has a tendency to prize the short-term bottom line above all other considerations, including the ability of its workers to make ends meet. The anti-minimum wage gang will "twist itself into knots rationalizing a corporate-backed agenda," John Stoehr observes in The American Prospect. And there is no question that those opposed to raising the minimum wage will prey upon our fears of joblessness and the bad economy to try to convince us that the minimum wage needs to stay where it is.

Corporate lobbyists are busy spreading distortions and outright lies in their attempt to hold back minimum wage increases supported by the vast majority of working people. Here are some of the biggest falsehoods that are going around, along with facts you can use to discredit them.

More here.

And I hope you click through to read those myths--it's short, so you might as well.

Indeed, I've been hearing myths about the minimum wage since I was a teenager and trying to start to get an handle on what economics are about. If you listen to conservatives, the minimum wage is necessarily bad for the economy because it makes it more difficult to hire people, which kind of makes sense, even though it's ultimately dead wrong, because you get into your head this notion of a fixed payroll that can only go so far. Sadly, there has been virtually no intellectual counter to the mythology about the minimum wage. Without any competing ideas, the mythology continues to rule the day.

But here's the reality. Increasing the minimum wage gets money into the hands of people who will spend it on a wide variety of good and services. This necessarily increases demand, which, in turn, increases business activity, which, in turn, results in more jobs, not less. That conservatives and business owners don't even consider this is one of the major fallacies of economic discussion today: it's short-sighted, and it's from the extraordinarily narrow point of view of individual business owners and corporate entities; that is, it doesn't see the economy as the massive tapestry composed of multiple threads and strands that it is.

So, sure, if you own a business, it sucks that you have to pay for your labor, and in that sense the minimum wage is bad for the economy. Your economy. But in the sense that everybody having more money to spend increases economic activity across the board, the minimum wage is fucking great for the economy. That is, everybody's economy, or more simply, the economy.

But I guess I'm old fashioned that way: economics ought to serve the people as a whole, not simply the relatively small percentage of the people who own most of the capital.

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