What’s the Right Minimum Wage? | 5 Minute Video
What’s the perfect minimum wage: is it $10 an hour? $15? $20? How about zero? That’s right. Zero. While Congress discusses a minimum wage hike, economist David Henderson shows that any minimum wage makes it harder for unemployed people (particularly young people) to find work and forces business owners to cut the hours of lower-skilled employees.
🚨 PragerU is experiencing severe censorship on Big Tech platforms. Go to https://www.prageru.com/ to watch our videos free from censorship!
SUBSCRIBE 👉 https://www.prageru.com/join/
📲 Take PragerU videos with you everywhere you go. Download our free mobile app!
Download for Apple iOS ➡ https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/prage…
Download for Android ➡ https://play.google.com/store/apps/de…
📳 Join PragerU’s text list! https://optin.mobiniti.com/prageru
SHOP! 🛒 Love PragerU? Visit our store today! https://shop.prageru.com/
Script:
“The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00.”
That was the headline of an editorial in one of America’s most prestigious newspapers. Can you guess which one? The Wall Street Journal, perhaps? Right city; wrong paper. This editorial appeared in the New York Times in 1987. “There’s a virtual consensus among economists,” the Times wrote, “that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed.” So, economists and the liberal paper were on the same page (pun intended).
Why?
Because they understood that a minimum wage does not guarantee jobs. It guarantees only that those who get jobs will be paid at least that minimum. And that leads to two bad outcomes: unemployment and higher prices.
I can best explain this by asking a simple question: What is a wage? A wage is the price of labor. Now, what happens if the price of labor rises, not because workers have become more productive, not because a business must pay higher wages to hold on to valuable employees, but only because the government requires it?
When the minimum wage rises, employers will adjust. They will use less labor. They’ll fire current employees or cut back on their hours. They will also raise prices for their goods or services. These are undesirable consequences. But let’s also consider another bad effect Businesses will hire fewer workers, especially those with little or no job experience.
Suppose you’re young and haven’t worked many jobs before. Maybe you’ve never had a job and are trying to land your first one. The work you can offer an employer may be worth only, say, $7 an hour. You agree. He agrees. And you have your first job.
But what if the minimum wage set by the government is higher than $7? What if it’s $10 or more? Well, you won’t get the job. You may be willing to work for $7 an hour, but under minimum wage laws, it would be illegal for you to do so.
This very point was made by Paul Samuelson, one of the leading economists of the twentieth century, and a prominent liberal. I paraphrase from his classic textbook Economics: “What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him a minimum wage if the fact that he must be paid that wage keeps him from getting a job?”
And, that young person loses more than a paycheck. He also loses valuable work experience: learning to accept responsibility, dealing with a boss, getting along with co-workers — all the things that demonstrate to an employer that he made the right choice in hiring; and all the things that will help that young person get a better paying job down the road.
A recent study found that in some cities the unemployment rate for teens without a high school diploma approached 50%. Pricing these teens out of the labor market does them no favors. It’s not doing the rest of society any favors, either. Teenagers who can’t find jobs often find trouble.
Advocates of a higher minimum wage argue that, while some young people might be priced out of the job market, this is outweighed by the fact that those who have minimum wage jobs will get a wage increase. But that doesn’t mean they’d be better off.
For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/videos/whats-right-minimum-wage
source
Two family-owned butcher shops in my city have closed their doors in recent months, one of which had been a cornerstone of the community for seventy years. When wage increases outpace the price adjustments that customers are willing to accept, small businesses often bear the brunt of the impact. This is particularly disheartening, as many small businesses provide far better treatment to their employees than large corporations.
People who push for higher minimum wages fail to realize that higher wages mean higher costs of goods and services 😢
I think there should be a universal minimum wage. But minimum wage shouldn’t a living wage. It should be an introduction to the workforce. In, CA (which is the state I live in) constantly raises minimum wage claiming that cost of living is out of control. But what in reality, raising the minimum wage raises the cost of living as well. Fortunately, Californians wised up and voted down a minimum wage increase proposal. To sum up, I’m for minimum wage as an introduction work force. It should not be a living wage.
Great piece, and timeless.
The problem with this view it it assumes that if you get a good job and do well that you will be able to get a better job. There are limited higher paying jobs someone has to do entry level jobs and their is no guarantee the employer will pay more for good work.
Have we learned NOTHING? So Kamala is a politician, therefore id expect she know these things. NO, she goes out and advocates for this crap, which will probably lead to disaster if she Is elected. Lord, am I ashamed of our government, its representatives, and the braindead citizens we foster.
PragerU are probably firmly against a universal basic income.
But they also oppose any minimum wage.
It's one or the other. Make your choice. Which one will it be?
These hardcore rightist were the ones abusing workers in the 1800 to early 1900s and needed the government to step in and protect people from abuse by companies making tons of money and paying slave labor.
Needs to be 13.00 at best come on people we aren't just teens wroking its adults wroking in between jobs or have disabilities or have others reason makeing it impossible to have a decent paying job and career jobs cut wrokers to don't lie.
What you haven't addressed is what it's like for people working full-time but having to rely on food stamps because the minimum wage is so low. Is there a middle road between two extremes? Does it always have to be swings & roundabouts?
👍👍
can PragerU start posting the links to the articles/surveys that they are getting their statistics from?
I need them for an essay haha
Here, we have a tale of two untrustworthy entities. The government and employers. The minimum wage is too high for business, but without one businesses would pay almost nothing.
Zero
This is something left politicians don't understand.
I find it amazing that you say “oh no, the jobs would be attacked” as if the sole basis of capitalism doesn’t require a massive reserve of people without jobs in order to keep the work force flowing and working under economic duress. After all, the more desperate people there are that need work, the more expendable the average person is, which is a goal that most every free-market capitalist agrees to. Sounds to me like you’re arguing against something that would actually help you. If you’re worried about jobs, most industries are very lightly affected, and that only means you need to work on counterbalancing it with new ones to make the minimum wage work. The minimum wage also has a certain threshold requirement for being economically viable in this system, so the issue is largely about moderation, which is precisely what a 15 dollar wage is. Without the minimum wage, you still create wider profits using the excess workforce necessary, so I guess the real benefit of not having it for you is keeping the workforce more desperate at a lower cost than with a minimum wage increase. Overall, it’s only viewed as better to destroy the minimum to make more money, which costs quality in their jobs at a much wider level than what would be lost by quantity of jobs.
2:32 seriously using an argument for enabling the underpayment Black employees because of their race to justify not paying anyone. nice one hitlerUth.
Minimum wage makes your dollar more worthless pretty much.
What is the right maximum wage?
No wonder why the job opportunities are shipped to China and Asian countries like Indonesia and Vietnam
As usual, government is the problem, laissez-faire is the solution.
Would we rather have no wage than one? Course not, you need money not “experience” to pay for rent or healthcare. Learning skills is great and all but if I can’t even feed myself because of how little a job pays then something needs to change and a higher minimum wage is how you do it. No longer are the days that teens are the face of minimum wagers but now the middle aged who in turn of not having a degree must work a job that hires them. So if we’re to help keep people alive and paying for basic needs we need to pay them a fair minimum wage.
$15 an hour for under the age of 18. After that, a minimum living wage. Depending on the area you live in with a minimum being $25 per hour. Better than a minimum wage, there should be a maximum wage. Nobody should be making more than one million dollars per year. 2 million dollars per year for family.
Workers productivity has been through the roof for decades but wages have not kept up. We need a living wage. Prayer U is against working class
The cost of living has gone up but wages haven’t.
In my country due to my age i get paid around €4,75. I don’t really care, since i have no financial obligation to anyone. for context i live in a western European country that has a high GDP. I also think that you can’t hold teens to the same standards as adults if adults make more than 2x than teens.
Raising the minimum wage doesnt help low wage workers, it causes everything to go up in price and/or results in layoffs which defeats the purpose of raising it. It also makes it more difficult for new younger workers to enter the workforce. Who is going to hire a teen at $15 an hour? The current Minimum wage is irrelevant because virtually every employer is starting at a wage much higher than $7.25. This makes it effectively meaningless, the Minimum wage is defacto abolished. I would say thats good. Let the market work through it.
This video is pure billsshit
If a bussness owner tells the workers that a federal minimum wage is bad for you, you better believe he's lying
Ok so if we raise the minimum wage, then everyone working at a minimum wage right now will be fired?
And their jobs will do… who?
Why can McDonalds pay Workers in Denmark over 20$ per hour? (+for americans craaaaazy benefits)
And wtf is this example with the donut shop?
Let me boil down what they said:
"A woman got her hours cut."
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW
😄凸
Minimum wage should be exactly that. The minimum allowable dollar amount that has the equivalent purchasing power in America that it has ever had. Having said that, the minimum wage right now should have the same purchasing power as minimum wage had 50 years ago. Not more. Not less. If that were the case, minimum wage right now would be $12. 47. Unfortunately, that isn't the case.
As Sowell says, the actual minimum wage is $0.00.
so you would agree that capitalism is fundamentally incapable of allowing working class people to earn a living wage
Believe it or not, New Zealand was the first country in the world to introduce the Minimum Wage. It is supposed to last for the first six months of your job. Instead, many women have worked their entire working lives on the Minimum Wage. It is a pathway to poverty!
death to prageru
The ELEPHANT in the room is the Illegality of federal minimum wage! Where in the Constitution does it allow the federal government to mess with wages at all? It doesn't. And the solution is to use the Constitution's Article VI, Supremacy Clause and principle of #Nullification to set as NULL and VOID all laws which are contrary to the Supreme Law of the Land.
Learn your Constitution and use it!
We could have negotiations but we need strong Unions and Americans have never been less Unionised also higher wages encourages people to work harder and the minimum wage should go up ever year regardless because productivity goes up every year or if not productivity then raise it with inflation
what happens when every single company says they will only pay you 50 cents per hour?
According to my experience: If the minimum wage is not set by the government and low, companies will exploit that, and profit from the worker's labour.
All I got to say I got my first job at 15 and I am making $12 an hour at Wendy's in total I made $160 they took 40% out of my check so then I got $110
I am no economist or statistician but I do have a calculator handy to prove how destructive a minimum wage is let's use 7.25 an hour. For 40 hour work week that comes to an annual salary of $15,080 or $290 a week pre tax. Now let's take some average expenses. Average health insurance plan $150 per week. Average apartment $275 per week average food expenses about $51 per week average transportation cost about $65 per week average utility cost $35 per week which comes to only $576 per week. So as you can see all a person has to do is get two full-time jobs of 40 hours per week and then drive Uber in their free time and they will have no problem getting by. Or maybe they could just be born rich and not have to work at all use their parents inheritances.
no minimum wage is always the correct answer. nothing could be more absurd than mandating a wage for people who have no skills.
I want to just defame this speaker, but rather will emphasize that human beings are inherently selfish. Nothing is mentioned about the shady character of those who are always wanting more. Capitalism emphasizes personal gratification and survival at the expense of others. There are no CEOs taking pay cuts to be more equitable to those they employ. Capitalism is selfish. In todays world, that selfishness can do more damage than in times past. Think about Google, Facebook, NRA, etc. These are huge companies that can literally change the direction of the country and world. It doesn't matter if a company is on the right or left really. The companies and their board are out for themselves. Most of their employees are nothing more than a number to these people. That's the problem. If the Left or the Right has their way, these companies will continue to grow and they have enough money to buy all the resources. Let's face it, price gouging is as American as apple pie. The minimum wage can work, but our current system is self defeating. Each time a different party get's power, they try and undo what the other party did. That isn't Democracy or compromise, it's power hungry politicians and they are the root of the problem. Shallow self serving politicians are cornholing any chance of us avoiding more problems.
JFC if the minimum wage is $0.00 then businesses will pay a super low poverty wage…..if min wage is $1 then most employers will pay $1.
The Right minimum wage is the Slavery
.
Here is a fact FDR the greatest leader in world history said the minimum wage should be a living wage. He also said in his four freedoms speech everyone has a right to a home and a job. Work experience is not the only solution. You can do things like join boyscouts of America and go to a jobcore program or even college. During the goldenage of economic expansion there were high rates of unionization. Life is about results and the fact is Denmark treats their workers alot better.