Logic is lost on these idiots!

I'm steaming at a report in the Wall Street Journal about the scarcity of jobs for teenagers in the present economic climate. The newspaper states the obvious:

The Department of Labor reported last week that a smaller share of 16-19 year-olds are working than at anytime since records began to be kept in 1948.




. . .

The lousy economic recovery explains much of this decline in teens working, and some is due to increases in teen summer school enrollment. Some is also cultural: Many parents don't put the same demands on teens as they once did to get out and work.

But Congress has also contributed by passing one of the most ill-timed minimum wage increases in history. One of the first acts of the gone-but-not-forgotten Nancy Pelosi ascendancy was to raise the minimum wage in stages to $7.25 an hour in 2009 from $5.15 in 2007. Even liberals ought to understand that raising the cost of hiring the young and unskilled while employers are slashing payrolls is loopy economics.

Or maybe not. The Center for American Progress, often called the think tank for the Obama White House, recently recommended another increase to $8.25 an hour. Though the U.S. unemployment rate is 9.1%, the thinkers assert that a rising wage would "stimulate economic growth to the tune of 50,000 new jobs." So if the government orders employers to pay more to hire workers when they're already not hiring, they'll somehow hire more workers. By this logic, if we raised the minimum wage to $25 an hour we'd have full employment.

. . .

The U.S. has long had a labor market flexible enough that when the economy grows, the jobless rate falls smartly. This time has been different, and the great danger is that Obamanomics has moved the U.S. to a permanently higher jobless rate as in so much of Europe. For America's teenagers this summer, that reality is already here.

There's more at the link. Highly recommended reading.

It never ceases to astonish me that so many allegedly economically literate politicians continue to make so basic, so fundamental an error. As fellow blogger Blunt Object points out:

... the sort of people who are cheerfully willing to accept the notion that “if you make booze more expensive, folks will buy less of it” will at the same time obstinately deny the notion that “if you make unskilled labour more expensive, folks will buy less of it”.

The “Dems” label is unnecessarily specific: populists all over fall for this s***.

. . .

... voting under the influence of beliefs like “minimum wages help minimum-wage workers” is the moral equivalent of walking into a crowded shopping mall with a belt-fed weapon, slipping on a blindfold, and firing at random while spinning around. You won’t see anything bad happen, and you aren’t aiming to hurt anyone, but it’s still a bad f*****’ plan.

Amen, brother!





Peter