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Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub

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April 11, 2006

Why not $50 an hour?

Tom McClintock's argument against raising the minimum wage.

An excerpt:

If a simple legislative act increasing the minimum wage to $7.75 is all that is needed to improve the lot of the working poor by just a little, then why not raise it to $10 an hour and get them to the poverty level? For that matter, why not raise it to $50 an hour, assuring every working Californian a comfortable living? The truth is that if your labor is worth $6.75 an hour and the minimum wage is raised to $7.75, you simply become unemployable. The first rung of the ladder is gone, and there's no place to start.

Proponents of this policy apparently believe that it is better not to have a job paying $7.75 an hour than to have one that pays $6.75. The French minimum wage is twice that of our federal minimum wage, and the result has not been greater prosperity. Quite the contrary, France's unemployment rate is twice the American rate, and it hovers at an intractable 40% within those communities that recently rioted for days.