I took Econ 101, so yes, I'm sure. And by the way, I myself am one of those "no longer counted" people. Should I be counted? I could take a job delivering pizza tomorrow, if I cared to. I just don't care to. Should I be counted?
No, I've been an active observer of the world.

It is an election year so we can expect both parties to play it fast and loose with the truth, while appealing to their bases baser instincts. Democrats played the minimum wage card this week.


Here are some other pesky facts that Dobbs failed to mention in his op-ed:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2002 report, of the 72.7 million hourly-wage workers in the US, only 2.2 million, a mere 3%, received minimum wages. While that's bad for them, it's not a national crisis.
Only 5.3% of minimum-wage workers come from families below the poverty line.
The highest proportion of minimum wage workers were in the retail trade (8%), whereas agriculture only claimed 2%.
The vast majority of minimum wage workers either have second jobs or live with other family members and are not sole-source providers of income.
Minimum wages provide artificial barriers to those seeking their first job experience. Unemployment among 16–19-year-olds was 17.3% in 2005, as opposed to 5.6% overall. When split out by ethnicity, Hispanic and black teens had unemployment rates of 25% and 40% respectively. Analysts have been railing for decades about the social effects of youth unemployment, without even considering as a potential causative factor the ever-increasing minimum wage during all that time.

Maximum Wage and Income Redistribution
 

After I read the below this week, I had to laugh, mostly because I knew his suggestion for a "maximum wage" would never fly. But I was a bit surprised by the vitriol in letters to the editor the next day. He was compared to Stalin and called a communist (this is the South, however). He's not arguing to get rid of capitalism. Give it a read and tell me if you agree with this guy:


To share wealth, rework the system

By EDWARD L. RUBIN
Published on: 06/21/06
Edward L. Rubin is dean of the Vanderbilt University School of Law.

Income disparities are an increasingly serious problem in this country. At present, the top fifth of the population receives more than 50 percent of the nation's annual income, while the bottom fifth receives around 3.5 percent. In addition, the percent of total national income has declined over the past quarter-century for the bottom 80 percent — while the share of the top 20 percent has steadily increased. As a result, we are approaching the income disparity levels of a Third World country.

Those who comment on America's income disparity often speak in terms of social stress. If these disparities continue, they suggest, we are likely to suffer from widespread demoralization or increasing class conflict. This seems to be an unpromising strategy, not only because there is no empirical evidence that it's occurring, but also because of its implicit, if strongly suppressed, suggestion that the poor and middle class ought to become more rebellious — something that would probably do no one very much good.

The theme that should be sounded is that the present distribution of income is simply unfair. Most of the adults in those lower four-fifths, even the ones in the lowest, work for a living, and most work as hard as the people in the top fifth. Our system is tilted against them.

The reason for our income disparity is not that the people in the top fifth deserve so much more money, but that we have a regressive tax system, excessive tax loopholes for the wealthy, unmonitored corporate compensation and a defective public educational system that limits social mobility and the ability of people who can't afford private school to develop their talents. The image of the lazy, unmotivated poor is largely a myth, and certainly doesn't apply to four-fifths of our population.

So how can we deal with this in a progressive manner? To begin, raising the minimum wage is probably a good approach, but lowering the maximum wage may be an even better one.

Executive compensation has reached stratospheric levels in the United States, largely because of stock options and other incentive-related payments. This sounded like a wonderful idea at the time it was first conceived — pay the top executives better if the firm makes higher profits — but it has spiraled out of control. The problem is that the corporate board members who approve these payments are spending the firm's money, not their own; they don't benefit from the firm's profit levels or suffer if the firm squanders its resources on excessive executive salaries.

Unfortunately, the only way to limit executive compensation is through national regulation, and there does not seem to be much taste for solutions of this sort.

The other way to redistribute income is through the tax system. One would imagine that a redistributive tax system would garner widespread popular support. But it is a somewhat weird feature of the American mentality that so many people in this country think they have a chance of becoming wealthy, and often identify more closely with the interests of an increasingly remote elite than with their own interests. This is amplified by the continuing reverberations of frontier individualism, the belief that people deserve to keep "their" money, and should not have it taxed away for public purposes.

For both these problems — excessive corporate compensation and a regressive tax system — I think we need a new political discourse. People need to understand that everyone's money comes from the economic system to which we all contribute.

Corporate executives, and even individual entrepreneurs, can only earn the amounts they do because the system provides them with a framework that generates large rewards for those fortunate enough to be located at its crucial junctures.

While talent and training should be appropriately compensated, that compensation should not be so far out of proportion with the rest of society.

The economy grows through the efforts of all working Americans, and all should be able to improve our lives as a result of it, not just the top 20 percent of the population.

Yeah, I was tickled by those images, myself. I don't doubt that we are better off, today, but I do think there is a widening gap and on the bad end are usually single women/mothers trying to scrape enough money together to try to get a deposit in on a low-income apartment and out of the weekly stay places downtown. They work jobs at/slightly above minimum wage with no benefits, hardly a "living wage".

The gap, today, is an interesting one in that people aren't out deficient in the same ways they were decades ago. Standards of living are up in some aspects, but down in others. Cheap, fattening food might be easier to come by, but healthcare is largely absent from low wage workers.

I've pointed it out, before, but this book was an interesting experiment in living in those conditions. It can be done, but getting out of that condition seems extremely difficult except for a lucky few. The conditions these people live in are certainly better than the poor of 1930, but their lives are hardly full of luxury coffee and air conditioned bliss. They're unhealthy and fairly miserable.

Commie.

Dean Rubin has been a consultant to the Asia Foundation Project on the Administrative Licensing Law for the People's Republic of China, the Russian Privatization Center and to the United Nations Development Programme.

Rage must be right! Wait a minute, "Russian Privatization"??? Now I'm confused.