You’ve heard the liberals demand higher wages. You’ve also seen them condemn the new tax cuts. So, what happens when we analyze the left’s demands against their success rate? You already know the answer, but here’s a chance to see if the left or right is better at getting pay raises for Americans in detailed, inarguable, raw numbers.
Fight for $15
The fight for $15 movement has been active for at least 5 years. Unsurprisingly, they quickly gained progressive and far-left support, and they have been spouting their nonsense incessantly ever since. While the movement has been completely denied at a national level by both major parties, they have seen small victories. You probably remember that the entire states of California and New York have committed to $15 minimum wage.
Another range of municipalities and small regions are undergoing similar experiments. While commitments have been made, very few regions are actually paying workers at the target minimum wage. In fact, the only complete transition in America is in Missoula where 15 government workers have received a minimum wage bump.
Despite the slow transition, there are minimum wage earners making $15 an hour. The bulk of them come from Seattle where large businesses are already locked into the obscenely high rate. Small businesses won’t be joining them until 2021. Because of this weird fragmentation, the estimate is that by the end of 2018, no more than 40,000 workers in the country will be making a minimum wage of $15 per hour. By 2023, that number could potentially rise to 80,000, but delays have already plagued efforts. This is the grand accomplishment of five years of relentless campaigning.
Tax Cuts
The Republican tax plan took a total of a few months to draft and pass. It’s official start date is January 1, 2018. In response to the plan, a number of large employers across the country committed to raising wages, increasing hiring, spending more on training, issuing bonuses and expanding operations. The grand total of these commitments will put billions of dollars in the pockets of everyday American workers, but we’ll focus specifically on minimum wage for now.
50,000 workers from a number of banking groups, including Wells Fargo, the Fifth Third Bancorp and Associated Bank are scheduled to receive a minimum wage bump to $15 per hour by summer 2018. It took less than two weeks to secure those numbers, and all of it came with absolutely no government compulsion.
Instead, the chance for major companies to save money on excessive taxes was immediately returned to the labor force. Keep in mind, this is just a look at minimum wage earners. Across the board, companies have already announced pay raises and bonuses for more than 600,000 employees—a number which grows every day. There’s no real comparison in which method is better for the workforce.
Long Term Effects
The tax cuts don’t just win in the raw number of pay raises either. Since Seattle was almost a full two years ahead of anyone else in their minimum wage experiment, it’s the best place to pull data for analysis. If you recall, the University of Washington was commissioned by the city of Seattle to do exactly this, and what they found was shocking to the left.
On average, minimum wage earners in Seattle are making less money than they did before the mandated wage hike. Companies were forced to dramatically increase their labor cost without any additional revenue, so they took the only option possible and cut hours. Minimum wage earners in Seattle are working an average of half as many hours as before the raise, and that doesn’t include the dramatic rise in unemployment for that group. If you also add in the number of people who lost their jobs because of the wage hike, then you see a group that is suffering.
The tax cuts work for the same reason Republican economic policies are always better than their liberal counterparts: they understand supply and demand. While the left simply demands more money without finding a source for it, the right increased monetary supply. That empowered employers to reinvest in their businesses, and that process includes pay raises, bonuses, additional hiring and infrastructure spending. By cutting taxes, the economy has already grown, and we are finally seeing the wage growth that was infamously absent from the entire Obama economy.
Republicans aren’t against pay raises, even for minimum wage workers. We just happen to approach the topic from a logical standpoint. If you demand that employers pay higher wages without increasing their revenue, then you haven’t solved the problem. If, instead, you empower them to increase revenue, then wage hikes will always follow. It’s simple economics, and the left has even more irrefutable proof they have to try and deny.
~ American Liberty Report
