We’ve heard from this moron on any number of topics more times than I care to count. And with each and every time that she has chosen to open her big fact mouth, she provides us all with a bit more proof of how it is that one functioning brain cell simply is not enough. Rep. Gwen Moore, Democrat from Wisconsin, said in a recent interview with some Milwaukee television station, that she will be "saving my pennies" to pay her $691 disorderly conduct fine. This liberal lunatic was one of those arrested in a Milwaukee protest this past Thursday involving fast food workers who are now demanding, now get this, a minimum wage of $15 per hour.
"I’ll be saving my pennies to pay this $691 dollar fine," Moore told television reporters after her release. She was among the 26 protestors arrested after they refused to vacate the road they were blocking. Now keep in mind here that Ms. Moore, like many lawmakers, ‘earns’ the sum of $174,000 a year for her ‘work’ as a U.S. Representative. Moore told WISN-TV that she took part in the minimum wage rally, "to really protest the egregious inequality in our society." Actually, what I find as being quite egregious is the fact that this scumbag is able to continue rip off the American taxpayer in the amount of $174, 000 each and every year.
Anyway, this brain dead liberal loon went on to say, "I wanted to speak out on that. As I indicated earlier, you know, I’ve put on my best suit, had my hair done, my nails done and used the King’s English to debate this in Congress and no one is listening." She added, "What we see is a tremendous inequality based on an unfairness, that gap, between what people at the top make and what low wage workers make." Ok, now let’s think about all of this for a second. Instead of simply taking at face value that which we hear from Democrats like Ms. Moore and those in the state-controlled media, let us delve a little deeper into this ongoing ‘discussion.’
And lets discuss what it is that moron’s like Ms. Moore rarely, if ever, like to talk about. You see, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there are about 3.6 million workers who are at or below the minimum wage. That is 2.5 percent of all workers and 1.5 percent of the population of potential workers. Within that small group, 31 percent are teenagers and 55 percent are 25 years old or younger. That leaves only about 1.1 percent of all workers over 25 and 0.8 percent of all Americans over 25 earning the minimum wage. Now within that tiny group, most of these workers are not poor and are not trying to support a family on only their earnings.
In fact, according to a recent study, 63 percent of workers who earn less than $9.50 per hour (well over the minimum wage of $7.25) are the second or even third earner in their family and 43 percent of these workers live in households that earn over $50,000 per year. Thus, minimum wage earners are not a uniformly poor and struggling group; many are teenagers from middle class families and many more are sharing the burden of providing for their families, not carrying the load all by themselves. This group of workers is also shrinking. In 1980, 15 percent of hourly workers earned the minimum wage.
And what loons like Ms. Moore never like to acknowledge is the fact that today that share of the workforce is down to only 4.7 percent. Furthermore, almost two-thirds of today’s minimum wage workers are in the service industry and nearly half work in food service. Because this is where the minimum wage workers are. So, we have now established that the number of minimum wage workers is small and shrinking, that most minimum wage workers are actually not poor, and that most of them are young and/or working their way up the ladder rather than supporting a family. But do these pesky little fact stop those like Moore? Nope!
But let’s take things a step further by addressing another popular myth about the minimum wage: the relationship over time between the minimum wage and labor productivity. This one is particularly obnoxious because those selling this myth almost surely know that they are advocating for their preferred policy on the basis of a lie. Liberals love to trumpet a study claiming that if the minimum wage had risen in tandem with worker productivity, the minimum wage would be nearly $22 per hour. Yet another dingbat Democrat, and potential 2016 candidate Elizabeth Warren, has gone to great lengths to push this statistic into the policy debate.
Democrats would like us all to believe that the minimum wage should have risen at the same rate as worker productivity to ensure that workers continue to take home the same share of the value of the output they produce. However, the statistic they quote is meaningless because it is not measuring the relevant concept. Labor productivity may have risen faster than the minimum wage over the last twenty or thirty years, but the study getting all the press uses the productivity gains of all workers to calculate a hypothetical increase in the minimum wage. What is needed is a measure of the productivity gains of minimum wage workers, and unfortunately, the government does not produce such a number.
Luckily for the discussion at hand, the BLS does track the labor productivity of food service workers. The BLS data shows that in 2011 labor productivity gains in the food service industry were nonexistent (that is, equal to 0 percent). In 2012, it was slightly worse; labor productivity in the food service sector dropped by 0.1 percent. In limited service restaurants, where minimum wage workers are likely to be concentrated, labor productivity fell by 2 percent in 2012 while business owners saw their unit labor costs rise by 2.8 percent. Over the past few years, these workers, as a group, not only have not earned a raise, but they are getting paid more for doing less.
Taking a longer view, from 1987 to 2012 the same BLS data shows that worker productivity in the food service sector rose by an average of 0.6 percent per year. In limited service restaurants, the gains were slightly lower, only averaging 0.5 percent per year. Meanwhile, unit labor costs have risen by an average of 3.6 percent. Over this period the minimum wage has risen from $3.35 to $7.25 per hour which is an average annual increase of 3.1 percent. In other words, at least in food service, the minimum wage has risen at a rate five or six times as fast as justified by the gains in worker productivity.
These numbers reveal not just the selective statistics employed by the likes of Ms. Moore and her Democrat compatriots regarding their efforts to raise the minimum wage, but they also make very clear that the ongoing debate has much more do with politics than it has anything to do with actually helping the poor. Ms. Moore, as well as the many others in her party who continue to take part in what is in reality nothing more than a charade, hope that a majority of voters will choose to listen to them, and their many friends in the media, rather than troubling themselves to go looking for the actual facts involved, facts that very clearly discredit the Democrat position on the matter.
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