OUR GOVERNMENT WOULD RATHER PAY UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION

Economic Issues

January 14, 2010
THERE IS AN ENDLESS NUMBER OF JOBS

Earlier in the week, the Obama Administration said it would be "unrelenting" in putting Americans back to work. Indeed, Congress has named this its "top priority." However our elected representatives don't understand that there are, in fact, countless jobs in an economy. The amount of jobs are endless, what's up for discussion is how much someone is willing to pay for that job and how much someone else is willing to do it for. This is known as "supply and demand," says the Mackinac Center.

The best thing Congress could do if it really cared about job creation would be to lower or eliminate the minimum wage, says Mackinac:

* A high minimum wage prices low-income and low-skilled workers out of the job market.
* When an employer is forced to pay more, and doesn't believe an employee is worth that amount, the job is eliminated.
* Frankly, this often hits minority workers (particularly in Detroit) at a much higher rate and is often the cause of the disproportionate amount of unemployed blacks.

In 1970, economist Paul Samuelson was asked about a proposal to raise the minimum wage from its then existing level of $1.45 an hour to $2.00 an hour. He answered: What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2.00 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?

Economists are in near-universal agreement: Raising the minimum wage, as Congress has done repeatedly the past few years, almost always causes higher unemployment and more harm than good, says the Mackinac Center.

Source: Jarrett Skorup, "There Is an Endless Number of Jobs," Mackinac, January 13, 2010.

For text:

http://www.mackinac.org/11892

For more on Economic Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=17