The Federal Minimum Wage is Stupid

The Federal Minimum Wage Is a Scam Covered by a Fraud Wrapped in Bacon

Kamala Harris, my least favorite Presidential candidate, recently said she supported a federal minimum wage of $15 per hour, laughing and screaming that a federal minimum wage law was necessary so that a person going to work and earning the minimum wage could buy a house and support a family. This shows how hopelessly out of touch Kamala is.

Under the Biden/Harris administration, you’d cannot even afford groceries for one person if you earned the federal minimum wage. You certainly couldn’t make a car payment or buy car insurance. And forget paying rent.

We don’t need a federal minimum wage, because it’s a stupid concept promulgated by people whose understanding of economics is gleaned on private jets doing cocaine on their way to this or that celebrity wing-ding.

Minimum wage is better described as a “starter wage.” It’s the entry-level, foot-in-the-door wage that an employer must pay in order to teach a brand-new employee the skills needed to do the job. Most people who earn minimum wage either need some degree of training or they are doing a job that is so fundamentally simple that there are a plethora of people who could and would do that job for the same money.

There are about a million things wrong with a federal minimum wage of $15/hour, but we can boil them down to these.

• Almost every state and territory in the United States has its own state minimum wage law and only one state (Georgia) has a state minimum wage that’s lower than the federal minimum wage. So who needs the feds? This is like saying we need a federal law that says to drive 20 miles per hour in a school zone. States already have these laws.

• The federal minimum wage right now is $7.25 an hour. Raising it to $15 an hour is more than doubling it. That seems a little extreme.

• At this moment 29 states, 4 territories, and D.C. have a minimum wage above $7.25 an hour. (Other states have a minimum wage that’s exactly the same as the current federal minimum and only Georgia is below.) When the state minimum wage and the federal minimum wage are not the same, the higher one wins. So for most Americans, a federal minimum wage law is not impactful. It’s sort of like when the Biden/Harris regime enacted an anti-lynching law. In our current world where we have problems of inflation, war, drug abuse, homelessness, immigration, plummeting academic scores in schools, rampant antisemitism, and on and on … lynching does not exactly rise to the top of the list. But that’s the Democrat agenda—let’s solve problems that don’t actually exist.

• Washington D.C. already has a minimum wage of $17 an hour. So if specific areas want to change the minimum wage, they can.

• A federal minimum wage ignores the fact that living expenses can vary widely across the country. For instance (and I know this comes as a surprise to Democrats), it costs more to live in Manhattan than Iowa. Beverly Hills is more expensive than Idaho. Raising a family in Chicago costs more than doing the same thing in New Mexico. So the idea that any federal minimum wage would be “fair” for everyone is based on the flawed premise that things cost the same everywhere. The average rent in Manhattan right now is $4,683 a month, while the average rent in Iowa is $729 (and Manhattan prices are for an apartment while Iowa prices is for renting a two-bedroom home). It always surprises Democrats that we live in a Republic and the whole world isn’t Manhattan and Bel-Air.

• The idea that a family should be supported by minimum wage ignores the reality of what a minimum wage is. Nobody who works for any length of time should stay at the minimum wage. Typically, minimum wage is the entry to a job, but as the employee gains experience, acquires skills, or is able to demonstrate other valuable traits such as punctuality, reliability, creativity, or whatever, the wage goes up. A person who has been doing the same job for 40 years should not be at minimum wage; in fact, a person who has been on the job for 40 months should not be at minimum wage. Some people get an upward wage adjustment after 40 days. The minimum wage is just “paying your dues” to get entry.

• A lot of the coastal elite Democrats who favor a generous federal minimum wage benefit from an even more archaic system of entry-level workers. They use interns, most of whom are not paid a nickel. Washington, D.C. is filled with unpaid interns who work long hours and do all sort of disagreeable tasks for judges, justices, senators, congressmen, and bureaucrats. Nobody is pushing to institute a minimum wage for these interns.

• There are roughly 327M people in America. Only 1M of them earn minimum wage. Just 1% of all hourly employees earn at or below the federal minimum wage. In other words, this is a problem that does not affect many people. And there is a great deal of “churn” in this 1M population, meaning people move in and out of this group pretty quickly. It’s rare that a guy starts a job in 1980 and retires at the same job in 2020 having never been bumped up from minimum wage.

• What do we know about these people earning the federal minimum wage? Their main characteristic is easy to guess: they’re young. Most of them are 25 years of age or under and in many cases, they are in their very first job or they are in their first job in a specific industry or business. In other words, they’re green.

• If you look at hourly employees over the age of 35, less than 1% earn minimum wage. In other words, this entry-level wage barrier is broken with experience.

• Increasing the minimum wage means businesses have to pay more to hire newbies and that can be crippling to small businesses.

California recently increased minimum wage for fast-food employees to $20 an hour (with the exception of Panera, a restaurant that got an exemption). While many people applauded this idea, Forbes reported on its “unintended consequences,” which means “stuff that the Democrats didn’t think of.” I would like to point out that Forbes is hardly a bastion of conservative economic thought. A federal minimum wage is an idea so dumb that even some lefties can see it’s dumb. In the California gold rush to make all fast-food joints pay $20/hour minimum wage (that works out to $41,600 a year if you work full time), some bad stuff happened. Sometimes the bad stuff affected the restaurant owners, sometimes it affected the customers, and sometimes it affected the employees, the very people who were supposed to be helped by this federal minimum wage.

• Self-service kiosks and automation started to pop up in fast-food outlets, which means fewer employees are needed. Fewer new hires. Burger King has announced it will automate all of its restaurants, including the Popeyes and Taco Bell franchises it owns. Same for McDonalds, Shake Shack, and others

• The fast-food restaurants found another benefit with self-service options. Automated services tend to increase sales, that is, people order about 10% more when they use these options

• Not only that, but self-serve kiosks and other automation services do not have trouble getting along with other employees or get injured on the job or sue the company for harassment. They don’t need health insurance and they never put in for other benefits like tuition reimbursement. The new workers that are not being hired (or the old workers who got laid off) are not exactly missed

• Fast food outlets are starting to embrace mobile apps. Not only are apps proving useful, they reduce staffing needs and improve transaction flows. That means you need fewer people to make, sell, and collect payment for your products. Sure a few humans may be around to collect the $20/hour federal minimum wage, but many more people who would have otherwise been hired won’t get a job at all

• Fast food chains are gaining momentum in terms of revamping their operations, thanks to a high minimum wage. Some of these chains are looking to AI to help them manage scheduling and staffing, which could reduce staffing needs even further

• Some restaurants decided to cope with the higher minimum wage by cutting staff. El Pollo Loco in California reduced their human help by 10% to manage the $20 an hour wage

• Some businesses just laid workers off. Pizza Hut laid off 1200 delivery guys in California when the $20 an hour went into effect

• A few fast-food restaurants adjusted their menus to offer more premade and very simple dishes, reducing the need for help with food preparation

• And some just went out of business or moved. Rubio’s Coastal Grill closed all of its 48 restaurants in California and went to greener pastures where communists governors were not running the show

• Even with these measures, costs were still passed along to consumers; in 2024, fast food prices in California have gone up. Chipotle went up 6% to 7%, other restaurants have increased prices as much as 10%. Of course, Liz Warren and her Democrat coven are probably ranting on X that Chipotle is price gouging.

• I saw an article by one McDonald’s owner in California who had to shut down his restaurant. He blamed the $20 minimum wage for the closing. First he tried raising prices but that only went so far before he lost too much business to sustain it. Then he fired some people and that was “the last thing I wanted to do.” Now he’s closed.

The big problem with raising the minimum wage is that Democrats like to use this to say they’re dealing with a problem (high cost of living), when they’re actually doing nothing of the kind. It’s like bait-and-switch for stupid people. “I’ll fix the high prices by raising the federal minimum wage!” Kamala assures us. Meanwhile, everybody gets laid off and your hamburger now costs $27.

We need to educate our people, particularly new entrants into the work force, what the minimum wage is and how to beat it. New workers should be conditioned not to want to settle for the minimum wage and to learn that there are many ways to do better than the minimum wage. Kamala acts like everybody in the country is dealing with the minimum wage and she can wave a magic money wand to fix things.

Increasing the minimum wage to ensure the American dream is like taking ballroom dancing lessons to learn to be a military sniper. They’re unrelated concepts.

Very few workers—even hourly workers—earn the minimum wage and most of them are just starting out in life, not trying to pay a mortgage and support a couple of kids. Boosting the minimum wage increases costs to consumers. Far more people were adversely impacted by higher fast food prices in California than were helped by a higher minimum wage for fast-food employees. Plus these higher minimum wages are scrutinized by fast-food chains—if they can figure out how to do things more cheaply, they will. And in the case of fast food, easier meals, fewer employees, and automated solutions were the obvious answers.

A high minimum wage can also hamper, even cripple, businesses who need ways to recruit raw talent who have no clue what they’re doing but are willing to learn a new job and new skills. Most businesses who hire rookies are doing so at a loss at first, but it’s a good gamble. A beginner may not do well at first, but if they learn the job well and have a good attitude, they can be an asset to the business. And usually when people become valuable to a business, they get more money (or they go to another similar business and market themselves there as an experienced employee).

Making minimum wage an issue fixates on poverty. It encourages people to think that they will never get more than the minimum wage or that if they ever get their first job, their wages will never ever go up, not matter what they do.

Here’s a fun fact. Right now, at McDonald’s there are over 200,000 jobs that pay over $100,000 a year. A person who gets a job at McDonald’s can either work the counter and feel defeated and do all in her power to remain at minimum wage for life …  or she can consider going for one of the bigger jobs. Now getting one of the high-dollar jobs requires a lot—it may take education (McDonald’s offers tuition reimbursement), lots of experience, a good track record, and special skills. But it’s do-able.

If it wasn’t do-able, no one would have ever done it.

Over 10% of all Americans earn more than $100,000 a year compared to just 1% who are at minimum wage. That means for every minimum wage person in the workforce, there are 10 people making six figures or more.

Yet how many politicians and teachers and influencers in our society try to impress on people just entering the job market that they can become very successful? Democrats in general and Kamala in specific like to draw people’s attention to the fact that they are pitiful, helpless, hopeless victims, when, in reality, they may be entering one of the greatest and potentially most rewarding job markets in the world?

Do you know who Chris Kempczinski is? I have no idea how to pronounce his name. He’s not exactly a fixture in the news. But he is famous, because he’s the CEO of McDonald’s. In 2022, he earned $20M a year. That’s $384,615 a week. Nice job. He’s educated (MBA), has a long work history, and has a track record of innovative ideas. He also doesn’t work for minimum wage.

Liz Warren will rail against him because he makes more money than a fry cook just starting out. But rather than encourage the grievance victim culture Democrats seem to love, why not encourage young people to try to be CEOs or marketing managers or accountants or attorneys? In our influencer, celebrity-driven TikTok culture, people are forgetting that there really are high-paying jobs available to people willing to put in the effort to qualify for them. It may be more glamorous to be a movie star or a musician, but why not encourage young people to go for the real money—the people who hire the influencers and celebrities and actors? We live in a culture where the American dream is dying because we have starved it to death. We don’t dream it any more. We don’t even talk about it. We certainly don’t want our young people to imagine there is any possibility of living life except as a downtrodden miserable victim!

Why not encourage new employees to appreciate entry-level jobs and advise them on the things they can do to “level up” to higher pay grades?

Democrats would rather Americans be depressed, aggrieved, and impoverished than inspired and prosperous. Here is a little known fact. Most businesses are actively looking for skilled employees with integrity and good attitudes and will reward them over time as their skill set and experience increase. In fact, if you talk to people who run big companies or have small businesses—they’re all looking for superstar employees.

The fact that 10 times as many Americans are earning six figures than minimum wage is what people should be talking about rather than making people just starting out in the job market or some new field to feel victimized that they’re “only” earning $8 or $10 an hour. There are ways forward and we should be instilling them in our younger workers rather than telling them that all they’ll ever get is a minimum wage and they better grovel at Kamala’s Christian Louboutin shoes and thank her for allowing us a few crumbs.

Kamala wants to raise minimum wage, because she doesn’t understand it. But then again, nobody said Kamala was smart, least of all us.