United Liberty

We often hear that an increase in the minimum wage is needed to help workers; however, increases in the minimum wage are largely responsible for so many teens and less experienced workers being unemployed:

Perhaps you’ve already noticed around the neighborhood, but this is a rotten summer for young Americans to find a job. The Department of Labor reported last week that a smaller share of 16-19 year-olds are working than at anytime since records began to be kept in 1948.

Only 24% of teens, one in four, have jobs, compared to 42% as recently as the summer of 2001. The nearby chart chronicles the teen employment percentage over time, including the notable plunge in the last decade. So instead of learning valuable job skills—getting out of bed before noon, showing up on time, being courteous to customers, operating a cash register or fork lift—millions of kids will spend the summer playing computer games or hanging out.

The lousy economic recovery explains much of this decline in teens working, and some is due to increases in teen summer school enrollment. Some is also cultural: Many parents don’t put the same demands on teens as they once did to get out and work.
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[T]he minimum wage increase has coincided with the plunge in the percentage of working teens. Before the most recent wage hikes, roughly seven million teens were working. Now there are closer to five million with a job and paycheck.

Black teens have had the worst of it, with their unemployment rate rising to 41.6% in April from 29% in 2007, faster than almost any other group. A 2010 study by economists William Even of Miami University of Ohio and David Macpherson of Trinity University found that as a result of the $2.10 increase in minimum wage, “teen employment dropped by 6.9 percent… . For the teen population with less than 12 years of education completed, teen employment dropped by 12.4 percent.” For teens priced out of the labor market, their wage fell to zero.

The current state of the economy obviously has much to do with the high unemployment numbers for teens, but as you can see in the chart provided by the Wall Street Journal, the decline began around 2007 (when George W. Bush agreed to an increase in exchange for supplemental funding for Iraq) and has continued to steadily drop off.

Some on the left believe we should raise the minimum wage even higher than the current rate of $7.25 per house or even implement a livable wage. The folks pushing this don’t live in reality. Businesses already set aside a certain percentage of their expenses for labor. That isn’t going to change. Business owners will either cut back hours of their employees or layoff unneed workers.

That’s basic economics the left doesn’t seem to grasp.