Congress must vote to raise the minimum wage

It’s hard to write a weekly column on a Congress that turns three-day weekends into weeklong recesses. That’s right — Congress has adjourned until Jan. 27. After Congress passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill that keeps the government’s lights on until September, it’s worth considering an idea that requires no government spending and was proposed in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address last year: a raise in the federal minimum wage.

An increasing number of economists support a raise in the minimum wage, debunking the long-held myth that it would be a “job killer.”

Predictably, business backers of politicians overwhelmingly oppose the measure. All four candidates for governor in Illinois, for example, oppose raising the state’s minimum wage. Yet raising the minimum wage has polled favorably nationally among 64 percent of Independent voters and 57 percent of Republican voters in a CBS News poll conducted last November.

Since the 1960s, the increases in the minimum wage have lagged behind inflation, causing the purchasing power of a minimum wage salary to be even less than it was then. In other words, an employee in 1965 making the federal minimum wage of $1.50 an hour would have been able to buy more goods at 1965 prices than someone living on the minimum wage today.

A bill in the Senate proposed by Tom Harkin (D-IA) would correct both problems by bumping the minimum wage to $10.10 to correct for the historical lag and mandate that it rise in tandem with inflation, preventing such a lag from happening again.

The federal minimum wage, effective since 2009, stands at $7.25 an hour. The last federal law that reformed the minimum wage was passed in 2007. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 21 states have minimum wages that exceed the federal minimum wage (and 10 of those tie its increase to inflation). The rest of the states either don’t have one (and defer to the federal minimum), copy the federal minimum or have minimum wages below the federal level (causing the federal minimum to apply).

Is there something wrong with this picture?

The old-school economic curriculum holds that raising the minimum wage is a recipe for higher unemployment. This is because when a good (a job, in this case) is in demand (people are looking for jobs), raising the price floor (the minimum wage) of providing that good to the supplier (the employer) will create a shortage (higher unemployment) because the good is now more expensive to produce. In other words, if doing each math problem on tonight’s homework suddenly took twice as long (cost more to supply), a given student might decide to supply less math problem answers to the professor in the next day’s class.

I’m not an economist. If you’re looking for the economic case for raising the minimum wage, type “Paul Krugman minimum wage” into Google and read until your economic heart is content. If you don’t believe Krugman, move to San Francisco. The city raised its minimum wage above the federal level in 2004, and in seven years its employment rate had increased at a higher rate than any other county in the Bay Area.

But I don’t want to live in a society that solves social problems with an economics textbook. If I did, I would move to Pyongyang, North Korea. Isn’t there a moral case for raising the minimum wage?

A report out from Oxfam, a global organization dedicated to fighting poverty, reveals that the world’s 85 richest people are as wealthy as the bottom half of the world’s population combined — some 3.5 billion people. That should be enough to support any policy that tries to put more money in the pockets of those who are far too often exploited by the top 85.

President Obama gives his annual State of the Union address next Tuesday. Contrary to the beliefs of some, we shouldn’t measure prosperity by the state of the strong, the “job creators,” or the “investors,” but rather by the state of the millions of people that get up every morning to work an 8-hour day and come home every night to car payments, electrical bills and grocery receipts. The state of the union is measured by the state of those people, and President Obama should remind Americans of that Tuesday night.

Nathaniel Haas is a sophomore majoring in political science and economics. His column, “State of the Union,” runs Thursdays.