As the rest of the country raises the minimum wage to appease the Fight for $15 crowd, one state has decided to reduce the minimum wage. Has the state finally learned basic economics and how the minimum wage hurts everyone except corporations and unions?
Missouri announced that it will allow St. Louis to roll back the city’s minimum wage from $10 to $7.70 per hour, which is what the rest of the state has.
Governor Eric Greitens noted that the left may think the minimum wage helps the impecunious, but it doesn’t. It hurts them.
“Our state needs more private sector paychecks and bigger private sector paychecks. Politicians in St. Louis passed a bill that fails on both counts: it will kill jobs, and despite what you hear from liberals, it will take money out of people’s pockets,” the governor said in a statement.
“This increase in the minimum wage might read pretty on paper, but it doesn’t work in practice. Government imposes an arbitrary wage, and small businesses either have to cut people’s hours or let them go. Liberals say these laws help people. They don’t. They hurt them.”
Chris Rossini had the best response to the news:
“Government can artificially raise wages, but it can’t magically make people more valuable to employers. If you’re only capable of earning $6 or $7/hr, no one is going to pay you $10/hr, no matter what the government says.
“The real minimum wage is $0.
“No one has to give anyone a job.”
When will officials realize that wages are a price like anything else? When these prices spike, the consumer (in this case business) will purchase less. You can’t pass legislation to make a worker more valuable to any given company. It’s just common sense, which isn’t so common.
Let’s hope the rest of the country doesn’t fall for the social justice scam.
JRATT1956 says
Of course there is a problem when only one city in a state raises their minimum wage, what was St. Louis thinking. I do not believe the minimum wage needs to be $15 everywhere in the U.S. But $7.25 in Los Angeles and NYC may just be why people are not leaving the welfare system for a low paying job.
Minimum wage is now $8.15 in Montana and I have seen more new companies open retail stores in my city of 55,000 over the last 8 years, than in the previous 15 years. Montana is open for business even with a minimum wage that is almost $1 more than the Federal minimum wage. Why are all the states with higher minimum wage than the states around them doing better? Minimum wage increases do not seem to be hurting them as much as the talking heads think.