6 Reasons Conservative Ron Unz Wants to Raise the Minimum Wage to $12 An Hour

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/ron-unz-makes-case-higher-wage-then-president-obama?akid=11458.277129.VbNw8J&rd=1&src=newsletter952818&t=3



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1. It’s an idea that’s gained respectability.

“I published a 12,000-word article in 2011 that argued very much the case for a large hike in the minimum wage. In fact, the figure I was talking about then was between $10 and $12 dollars an hour at the federal level, which seemed totally outlandish at that point in time, but now is getting to be closer to what people are debating. The minimum wage issue had dropped off the radar screen. Even though I’m more on the conservative side, I’ve been friendly for a number of years with the late radical journalist Alex Cockburn, and he wrote a long piece analyzing our arguments. He was very supportive. Then James Galbraith picked up on it. And interestingly enough a number of conservatives and a number of right-wingers suddenly looked at the issue in a new way.

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2. Objections over job loss can be easily overcome.

When I discuss the issue with conservatives, including very staunch conservatives, probably 90 percent of the resistance is in the job loss issue. Once my issue got on the radar with the filing of my initiative, I was invited to be on three of the biggest conservative talk radio stations on West coast, because who’s this conservative who supports a higher minimum wage? The reaction I got from each of the hosts was, “How could any conservative support a higher minimum wage?” And then I started to explain the reasoning and they never really thought of it before, and they seemed to think the points that I was making made an awful lot of sense. And I can see many of them supporting it down the road.

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3. A two-income family would earn $50,000 a year.

If you go with a $12 an hour minimum wage, which is generally the figure that I have been advocating, even on the federal level, a single worker who is fulltime would get $25,000 a year, almost exactly. A couple would get $50,000. [Editor’s note: The average American income in 2013 was about $51,000.] Now, if you’re earning $50,000 a year you’re not wealthy. You’re not affluent. But you can generally get by on something like that in most parts of the country. And you automatically lose your eligibility for anti-poverty programs because you’re no longer poor. It’s not that you have to change the laws. It’s that if you’re not poor, you don’t get poverty subsidies. Now you would still get some of them, but you would get much less.

4. Spending on welfare could fall by $40 billion.

The estimates, and it’s a very complex calculation of what savings there would be, but I would think that if you are raising the wages of lower wage workers by about $150 billion a year, which is roughly what you get, I think, there would be about $40 billion reduced in social welfare spending. It’s not like they would lose dollar for dollar, but the average fulltime worker would get an increase of $5,000 a year—$10,000 per couple. And those are life-changing amounts of money for a low-wage family. If they get an extra $5,000 a year and lose, let’s say $1,000 or $1,500 a year in social welfare benefits, they’re certainly much better off. I think society is better off as well.

[exboyfil]

1. Use the tax code to favor full time

employment over part time employment. ACA funding should have been based on dollars/hour and not on hours worked. May also want to think about how to create disincentives to use overtime instead of hiring additional staff.

[Hoyt]

2. This is a good article. Thanks.

This is interesting regarding price increases that might be necessary to cover an increase to $12/hour:

" . . . . . . Walmart, America’s largest low-wage employer, could cover a $12 minimum wage by a one-time price increase of 1.1 percent. The average Walmart shopper would pay an extra $12.50 per year.

McDonald's and fast-food places would probably have to raise their prices by 8 or 9 percent, something like that.

Agricultural products that are American-grown would go up by less than 2 percent on the grocery shelves.

And those sorts of price increases are so small that they would be almost unnoticed in most cases by the consumer."