A $12 Minimum Wage in Retail?
A lefty organization tries to repeal supply and demand.
Last week, just in time for the start of what yours truly and the vast majority of Americans call the “Christmas shopping season” — but which the press in virtual lockstep tags as the “holiday shopping season” — a policy analyst at a leftist think tank seriously proposed that all retailers voluntarily raise their employees’ minimum wage to $12.01 per hour, or $25,000 per year for those who work a forty-hour week year-round.
The study (“Retail’s Hidden Potential: How Raising Wages Would Benefit Workers, the Industry and the Overall Economy”; full PDF here) came from Demos, whose nice-sounding goal is to “make equality and democracy more than just ideals.”
Though it is often characterized as “non-partisan,” it boasts of “a partnership” with the openly liberal but really far-left American Prospect. Catherine Ruetschlin, the study’s author, appears to have had some possibly scrubbed involvement with Occupy Wall Street, and to have been a leader of an unsuccessful 2008-2009 effort aimed at “ridding the New School from the tyranny of Bob Kerrey.” Kerrey, the former Democratic U.S. senator, headed that New York City university for a decade before leaving when his second five-year term ended in January 2011.
According to her Demos bio, Ruetschlin “is currently completing a Ph.D. in Economics at The New School.” Before she receives that doctorate, she should be required to retake Econ 101, especially those pesky sections dealing with the profit motive and the law of supply and demand.
A lefty organization tries to repeal supply and demand.
Last week, just in time for the start of what yours truly and the vast majority of Americans call the “Christmas shopping season” — but which the press in virtual lockstep tags as the “holiday shopping season” — a policy analyst at a leftist think tank seriously proposed that all retailers voluntarily raise their employees’ minimum wage to $12.01 per hour, or $25,000 per year for those who work a forty-hour week year-round.
The study (“Retail’s Hidden Potential: How Raising Wages Would Benefit Workers, the Industry and the Overall Economy”; full PDF here) came from Demos, whose nice-sounding goal is to “make equality and democracy more than just ideals.”
Though it is often characterized as “non-partisan,” it boasts of “a partnership” with the openly liberal but really far-left American Prospect. Catherine Ruetschlin, the study’s author, appears to have had some possibly scrubbed involvement with Occupy Wall Street, and to have been a leader of an unsuccessful 2008-2009 effort aimed at “ridding the New School from the tyranny of Bob Kerrey.” Kerrey, the former Democratic U.S. senator, headed that New York City university for a decade before leaving when his second five-year term ended in January 2011.
According to her Demos bio, Ruetschlin “is currently completing a Ph.D. in Economics at The New School.” Before she receives that doctorate, she should be required to retake Econ 101, especially those pesky sections dealing with the profit motive and the law of supply and demand.
