If it’s so great, then why not immediately adopt Nick Hanauer’s $16 minimum wage?
Mar 9, 2015, 12:12 PM | Updated: 12:37 pm
David Boze asks if there's no negative economic impact to increasing the wage to $12 an hour, why wouldn't you just go to $16 an hour in 2016? (AP)
(AP)
Taken from Monday’s edition of the David Boze Show on AM 770 KTTH.
Nick Hanauer, venture capitalist, wants to spend his dough Tim Eyman-style. He’s threatening to basically become a progressive initiative hound.
He thinks $16 an hour is really a no-brainer and if the Legislature would just pass this $12 an hour minimum wage, maybe the $16 would go away. That’s the impression you get from reading Danny Westneat’s column in The Seattle Times:
“They think $12 is high? Here’s the real choice: they can accept $12 now or it’ll be much, much higher. If you’re the Association of Washington Business, you should run, not walk, to Olympia and demand they pass that $12 wage bill.”
Related: House votes to raise minimum wage to $12
What Hanauer says, with his $16 an hour initiative, if he were to do it, it wouldn’t be $16 an hour over four years. It would be $16 an hour right now. It would be $16 an hour in 2016 because why wait?
I have to say, if you follow through the logic of most of these kinds of debates, Hanauer has a point. After all, most of the time the logic used to increase minimum wage is simply that increasing the wages would allow people to buy more, it wouldn’t hurt anybody, it would improve the lives of families, it would enable people to pay their bills and buy more products. It would probably lead to even more job creation because the person who is making $12 an hour is more likely to be able to afford coffee or whatever else that they couldn’t afford before. So why bother waiting?
The argument, boiled down, is some people need to plan. If people were being exploited before and the profits are so big, than surely those profits are built-in somehow. So there’s no reason why anyone should oppose that increase in wage.
Well, you and I both know that’s not true. People plan well in advance for the amount of capital they need to be able to pay people, what the price of the products are going to be, and, not to mention, the fact that if you raise it to $16 an hour, that means your payroll taxes and the benefit packages will be dramatically higher.
When you think about the way the argument is made – that $12 an hour needs to be passed so people are able to live better – if it’s just that, if that’s the truth, and there’s no negative economic impact to increasing the wage to $12 an hour, why wouldn’t you go to $16 an hour in 2016?
If there really isn’t this potential for bad consequences for people of low skill who will be shut out of a job at a rate of $0 an hour – if that’s not your problem, then explain why it is that you have to wait so long?
Taken from Monday’s edition of the David Boze Show on AM 770 KTTH.
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