What Jared Bernstein Misunderstands About The Minimum Wage
Jared Bernstein has been over in my native UK and is amazed to find that what the minimum wage rate is and how it should be set is all done with a certain amount of civility rather than the tempestuous party political partisanship of his native US. Well, OK, we could simply ascribe this to us being English and the US not being so but that would be more than a tad culturalist.
Part of his answer is that the rate is set by the Low Pay Commission but that’s not really it. The true answer is that we have a modest minimum wage and we raise it modestly. And as everyone should know by now modest minimum wages don’t actually have much effect in any direction. So, given that the effects aren’t much, either on incomes or unemployment, then it’s not all that contentious an issue. Thus we can go off and ponder more important issues like how many of the Cabinet went to Eton or whether the columnists at The Guardian got dropped on their heads as babies.
Read the full story: www.forbes.com
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