It’s a headline designed to make President Ronald Reagan roll over in his grave: “Conservative Sen. Josh Hawley wants to raise federal minimum wage.” And we’re not talking about a minor increase: This “conservative” Republican senator just embraced a key part of the Bernie Sanders agenda, a $15 national minimum wage.
“Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley plans to introduce legislation Tuesday to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour — a position that aligns one of the most conservative Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill with some of the most liberal members of Congress,” CBS News reports. Move over, Bernie!
The statement Hawley put out could’ve been written by Sanders, too, as it bore his signature mix of working-class virtue signaling and factual inaccuracy.
“For decades, working Americans have seen their wages flatline,” Hawley said. “One major culprit of this is the failure of the federal minimum wage to keep up with the economic reality facing hard-working Americans every day.”
There’s just one problem: This isn’t true. It also makes no sense.
While this talking point is common on social media, workers’ wages have not, in fact, “flatlined for decades.” According to the American Enterprise Institute, “Since 1990, real median wages grew by 34 percent. Real wages at the tenth, twentieth, and thirtieth percentiles grew over this period by 50, 48, and 38 percent, respectively.”
We’d all like workers’ wages to have increased by even more. But Hawley’s fact-free assertions of “stagnation” undercut his credibility.
What’s more, the federal minimum wage plays a minimal role in the overall level of most workers’ wages because most workers already earn more than $15 an hour in the market. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average worker already earns the equivalent of $36 an hour. So, most workers wouldn’t see any benefit, and the broader problem of wage “stagnation” wouldn’t be resolved. Yet a $15 minimum wage would price some workers out of employment altogether.
Conservatives are supposed to understand that, as famed economist Thomas Sowell wrote, “the real minimum wage is always zero” — aka, unemployment. And when you artificially set the minimum wage at a rate like $15 an hour, you make it effectively illegal to employ anyone who can’t produce that amount in value for an employer. Whereas an employer might have been able to employ someone early in their career or with minimal skills/experience for $11 or $12 an hour, now they aren’t employable at all. How is that helping, exactly?
Of course, some workers do benefit from minimum wage hikes, and those are the people touted by do-gooder progressive politicians. But every policy has trade-offs. Politicians, typically left-wing ones, love forcing through minimum wage hikes because they can take a victory lap and look like they’re helping hardworking laborers. Yet once the dust settles and the camera crews are long gone, the other workers who never get hired as a result, the employees who get their hours cut, and the customers who end up paying higher prices often fail to receive the same attention.
There’s also a federalism problem with Hawley’s proposal.
DC COUNCIL PAUSES NEXT STEP IN INITIATIVE 82 MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE
The cost of living and the average wage wildly vary across the United States, and minimum wage rates should reflect that. There’s no reason for a one-size-fits-all policy that binds the entire country when the minimum wage can instead just be set at the state or local level. Conservatives are supposed to understand the importance of localism and federalism, rather than centralized national policymaking.
Yet Hawley’s political philosophy and policy positions aren’t tied to any of these classical conservative understandings. That’s not to say they are random: They are very well calculated. But those calculations are political in nature, not economic.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
