“If raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour would be so great, then why not $20 an hour, or $50 an hour?”
That was a question I (and countless other opponents of minimum wage laws) used to be able to make many years ago in response to people making arguments for increasing the minimum wage. The aim of the question was to get the gears turning in their heads, hoping they’d realize that there would be a point where even they’d have to concede raising the minimum wage would have consequences.
Those days are long gone, however. The Democrat Party has incorporated a $15 an hour minimum wage into their Party platform after it was strongly advocated for by then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Hillary Clinton also hopped on the bandwagon, and claimed to support a $15 minimum wage (to Bernie’s surprise). Meanwhile Elizabeth Warren, another leftist darling, wonders why the minimum wage isn’t $22 an hour.
Unbeknownst to them, if you want to see such high minimum wages in action, you need look no further than the federal government itself, which isn’t bound by the same basic economic constraints faced by firms in the private (i.e. real) economy. As the Washington Examiner discovered,
The government watchdog group Open the Books revealed in its report Mapping the Swamp, A Study of the Administrative State, that taxpayers are forking over $1 million a minute in pay and benefits to the federal workforce, for a total of over $136 billion a year.
In the past 10 years, Open the Books found an explosion in big paychecks. Those making $200,000 a year have jumped 165 percent and 406,960 earn $100,000 or more.
As a result, the group dubbed the $100,000 paycheck the federal “minimum wage.”
Not a bad gig, right? And it’s one where nobody quits – and you can’t get fired. The rate of firing and layoffs for public employees is 71% lower than in the private economy, and the quit rate of government employees is 70% lower than the private sector.
As our federal government continues to run deficits in the hundreds of billions, it’s clear that there’s plenty of fat available to trim off.
Share this crazy story with others now!
