The Warren Wage Won’t Fly

By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog

As if you needed another reason to vote against Question #2 on your November 5th ballot, Save Jerseyans, here’s a March 2013 clip which’ll scare the hell out of you.

Take it away, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA):

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwAQwItEjUo4

I want some of what she’s having, folks. It must be nice to go through life unrestrained by reality! Unfortunately for the rest of us, we have to live in the real job market quite unlike the former ivory tower occupant from the Bay State.

What’s even more unfortunate for New Jersey is that we’re about to adopt a constitutional amendment that could’ve been lifted right out of Elizabeth Warren’s twisted dreamworld…

First and foremost, I want to reiterate that it’s entirely reasonable for the primary breadwinner of a 4-person family to earn $22.00 per hour. At least! $32.00 is more like it for a state with New Jersey’s cost of living. No one is arguing against it.

The major problem with the “Warren Wage” theory is that our hypothetical primary wage earner isn’t the person who statics tell us earns the minimum wage.

An inconvenient truth for liberal politicians: as we’ve explained over and over again on this site, the vast majority of minimum wage earners are young, single and/or working to provide their respective family units with a supplementary income. In other words, the so-called minimum wage hasn’t historically been a “family wage” that individuals typically earn for extended periods of time. That’s precisely why past minimum wage hikes haven’t helped the Middle Class; they’ve succeeded only in driving up prices and producing dramatic increases in youth unemployment.

Sen. Warren and her kindred ideological spirits here in New Jersey often overlook the fact that there isn’t a minimum wage law on the books anywhere which actually requires employers to hire anyone! Consequently, whenever the minimum wage goes up, youth employment drops like a rock.

Senator Warren’s $22 per hour stat is also complete and utter nonsense. It only makes sense to someone with an antiquated, 1950s “assembly line” labor union worldview that finds no application in the modern global economy. All workers aren’t created equal; I don’t think anyone reading this post would disagree with that based on their own office experiences! Productivity varies widely between workers, so those who are at the middle or lower end of their workplace’s productivity scale are the first ones to lose shifts whenever a minimum wage hike takes effect.

Ironically, of course, that’s only begun to change (yet still only to a very limited degree) in recent years as the Obama “recovery” forces laid-off engineers and office administrators to seek second careers flipping burgers at McDonalds. It’s bad enough when a 18-year old has to move home because he or she lost their extra shifts. Minimum wage hikes strike hardest and most cruelly in down economies when parents with dependents bear the brunt of failed social engineering.

Moreover, I’ve never seen a minimum wage law with a travel ban written into the text. New Jersey already languishes with one of the country’s worst business climates. If Ballot Question #2 passes on November 5th, our minimum wage will rise to a full dollar higher than business-hungry neighbors New York, Delaware and Pennsylvania. EVERYONE can lose their job regardless of individual productivity levels when a company leaves the state…

Vote NO on Question #2, Save Jerseyans. The Warren Wage would be an utter disaster for the Garden State.