Thursday, June 9, 2011

war on poor

'Let's not look at the intentions behind minimum wage,' he said. 'We have to ask, what are the effects? Put yourself in the place of an employer who must pay $7.25 no matter whom you hire. Will that employer hire a person who can only add $3 or $4 of value per hour?' [says Walter Williams of George Mason University.]
He will not. And so fewer young people get hired and 'get their feet on the bottom rung of the economic ladder.' This hurts all young people, but black teens most, he says, because 'many of them get a fraudulent education in the public school system. So a law that discriminates against low-skill people has a doubly negative effect on black teenagers. The unemployment rate among black teens today is unprecedented in U.S. history. In the '40s, black teenage unemployment was less than white teenage unemployment.'

by John Stossel in his article, Government Against Blacks

while it may be statistically true that the minimum wage laws have hurt (primarily) young blacks, the real problem here is that a minimum wage hurts poor people, regardless of color/race/ethnicity... the idea behind minimum wage was to protect the poor from the corporate wage-masters... but has it kept more people down than it has raised up?

so, my question is this: knowing what has been painfully obvious for decades, what is the solution?... can we simply remove minimum wage laws without leaving workers unprotected against unfair employers?... if we overturn the Davis-Bacon Act, do we leave ourselves open to the lowest bidder who pays slave-like labor rates?... have we gone too far down the rabbit-hole to return from whence we came?

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