Screwing your erstwhile constituents because it "sounds" good.

http://tinyurl.com/yd9rkph
The Young and the Jobless The minimum wage hike has driven the wages of teen employees down to $0.00.
Yesterday's September labor market report was lousy by any measure, with 263,000 lost jobs and the jobless rate climbing to 9.8%. But for one group of Americans it was especially awful: the least skilled, especially young workers. Washington will deny the reality, and the media won't make the connection, but one reason for these job losses is the rising minimum wage.
****It will be said that "no-one can support a family on the unraised minimum wage..." but very few even try so the "argument" is silly.It's almost exclusively teens and those adding to other incomes.****
Earlier this year, economist David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine, wrote on these pages that the 70-cent-an-hour increase in the minimum wage would cost some 300,000 jobs. Sure enough, the mandated increase to $7.25 took effect in July, and right on cue the August and September jobless numbers confirm the rapid disappearance of jobs for teenagers.The September teen unemployment rate hit 25.9%, the highest rate since World War II and up from 23.8% in July. Some 330,000 teen jobs have vanished in two months. Hardest hit of all: black male teens, whose unemployment rate shot up to a catastrophic 50.4%. It was merely a terrible 39.2% in July... ****There are benefits to any employment, whatever the initial wage rate. Remember that Mark Twain worked at his first journalist job for nothing, so that he could prove his worth.
The real problem is that most discussions don't recognize what a job really is. The definition I like is the following: A job is an opportunity to create more present or future value for an employer than it costs to maintain the worker in the job. Once the value drops below the cost, the job disappears, except as a sinecure or subsidized position. It's too bad that more don't realize this simple fact and horrifying that much "job creation" isn't.
****