More than the Minimum Wage
It is easy to understand the frustration of (some of) these workers. Conservatives should not be glib about the fact that $7.25 per hour may buy you the bootstraps you’ll need to pull yourself up, but not much more. Average hourly wages of workers in the retail and leisure-and-hospitality industries have had a rough 5 or 10 years.
.. They found that only 11 percent of workers who would gain from raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.50 per hour live in poor households, while 42 percent live in households with incomes 3 times the poverty line or more — considerably above America’s median household income.
.. Increasing the minimum wage lowers the cost of investing in a machine relative to employing a low-skill worker. Applebee’s intends to put tablet computers at every table to facilitate food and drink ordering.
.. Households headed by a full-time worker should not live in poverty. Conservatives, who champion work and earned success, should be the first to agree that more can be done to encourage these goals. They have a very simple option: Expand the Earned-Income Tax Credit.
.. For a single worker with two children in 2013, the EITC paid 40 cents for every dollar of earned income up to $13,430, providing a maximum subsidy of $5,372.
.. the EITC has some shortcomings. It can impose significant marriage penalties, and it gives very little help to childless workers.
.. If you earn $7.25 per hour, for every hour you work the government would cut you a check for 3 bucks.
.. Liberals have argued that programs like the EITC represent a subsidy from government to business.
.. Liberals, in supporting minimum-wage increases, implicitly argue that the employers of low-skill workers, together with consumers of the products and services the workers help provide, should bear the burden of ensuring that low-skill workers don’t live in poverty. Conservatives should reject this argument, insisting that all of society is responsible for helping the working poor — to escape poverty, to earn their own success, to flourish.