George will: Let them eat cake!

There are, of course, no good arguments against raising the minimum wage -- eroded by inflation to its lowest real value since 1955. So let's take a look at George Will's latest column -- in which he calls for its abolition -- for a sort of taxonomy of really bad arguments.

Before Will even gets to those bad arguments, he parrots a popular but entirely meaningless meme that's gained great currency on the right …

Today, raising the federal minimum wage is a bad idea whose time has come, for two reasons, the first of which is that some Democrats have an evidently incurable disease -- New Deal Nostalgia. Witness Nancy Pelosi's "100 hours" agenda, a genuflection to FDR's 100 Days. Perhaps this nostalgia resonates with the 5 percent of Americans who remember the 1930s.

Allow me to translate from wingnuttese to English: If we define the New Deal not only as a basketful of Roosevelt's policies in the 1930s but as a consensus that guided the hand of government during the period between the end of World War II and the rise of the new conservative movement in the 1970s -- as one should do -- then Will is saying that Democrats are nostalgic for a time when the very idea of corporate accountability was born; a period in which America experienced an unprecedented increase in shared prosperity; an era when a huge middle class was built and a single semi-skilled worker could afford to raise his or her (mostly his) family with a modicum of dignity; an era when people had the reasonable expectation that their kids would have an opportunity to do better than they did and a time when government attracted halfway intelligent people who believed in public service instead of the half-witted hacks that the Hart-Rudman Commission in 1999 found to be the ultimate cause of an "unprecedented crisis of competence in government."Yeah, George, count me "nostalgic" for those days.

With that rant out of my system, let's go to Will's assault on the federal minimum …

Most of the working poor earn more than the minimum wage, and most of the 0.6 percent (479,000 in 2005) of America's wage workers earning the minimum wage are not poor.

Here's a nice bit of sleight-of-hand: the Bureau of Labor statistics says: "Of those paid by the hour, 479,000 were reported as earning exactly $5.15, the prevailing Federal minimum wage. Another 1.4 million were reported as earning wages below the minimum. Together, these 1.9 million workers with wages at or below the minimum made up 2.5 percent of all hourly-paid workers."

Of course, if you're making, say, $6 bucks an hour you're earning more than the minimum wage, but you'd still get a much-needed pay-hike if the minimum went to $7.25. How large is that group?

EPI:

An estimated 14.9 million workers (11% of the workforce) would receive an increase in their hourly wage rate if the minimum wage were raised from $5.15 to $7.25 by 2008. Of these workers, 6.6 million workers (5% of the workforce) currently earn less than $7.25 and would be directly affected by an increase. The additional 8.3 million workers (6% of the workforce) earning slightly above the minimum would also be likely to benefit from an increase due to "spillover effects".

Back to Will …

Only one in five workers earning the federal minimum lives in families with earnings below the poverty line. Sixty percent work part time, and their average household income is well over $40,000. (The average and median household incomes are $63,344 and $46,326, respectively.)

Those earning the minimum wage working part time are, of course, just keeping themselves busy while their yachts are in dry dock getting thoe pesky barnacles removed.

Anyway, the federal poverty rate for a single person is $9,800 per year, which means that even if "only" one in five earners getting the minimum are beneath the poverty line -- Will's throw-away statistic is actually a tragic aspect of the American economy -- there are many, many more who are simply "poor" by any reasonable standards.

Forty percent of American workers are salaried. [Note: this is just wrong -- over 60% are, according to the BLS] Of the 75.6 million paid by the hour, 1.9 million earn the federal minimum or less, and of these, more than half are under 25 and more than a quarter are between ages 16 and 19. Many are students or other part-time workers. Sixty percent of those earning the federal minimum or less work in restaurants and bars and earn tips -- often untaxed, perhaps -- in addition to wages.

Shorter George Will: None of my white, upper-class patrician friends earn the minimum, so therefore it should be abolished.