I think it is laughable to watch people who claim to be financially astute claim that raising the minimum wage actually benefits anyone. The market will just let it reach an equilibrium via inflation, and we will be back where we are today.

Besides, the market is already doing a great job at determining wage… hardly anyone even makes the minimum wage to begin with.

The truth is, if you start out working a minimum wage job, and you haven’t received a raise in a few months, probably aren’t providing value that is worth paying the minimum wage. It is ridiculously easy to get raises in those types of jobs… just show up on time and do a halfway decent job. Heck, even teenagers can manage that.

Here are interesting posts and news this week from the MoneyBlogNetwork and beyond: Consumerism Commentary asks if the fear of throwing away money is keeping you from quitting. AllFinancialMatters wonders if organic milk is worth the cost. MightyBargai…

“I also hope that employers will be able to absorb their extra costs…”
I’m sorry, but they won’t. Employers have families and need to make money too. They are not going to just let their labor expenses increase by 40 percent out of the goodness of their heart. No “absorbing” will occur. They will either have to raise prices, or find a way to have fewer employees do more work.

A government mandated minimum wage cannot force an employer to pay someone more than they are worth. If they cannot get 7.25 an hour worth of productivity and benefit out of someone, they simply will not employee that person. This means that the people with low skills, who are worth less than 7.25 an hour, will not be able to get jobs.

In any case, it’s not as big of an issue as people make it out to be. Only one in five workers earning the minimum wage live in families with household earnings below the poverty line. There are 75.6 million workers that are paid on an hourly basis, 1.9 million of which earn the minimum wage. More than half of them are under 25 and about thirty percent are between 16 and 19. Keep in mind that included in this number, are people like restaurant wait staff, who make a lot more than 5.15 an hour from tips. A bartender at an upscale restaurant for instance, can certainly clear 75,000 a year. Market prices have caused wages to increase on their own, the way it should happen. Mcdonalds doesn’t even pay the minimum wage anymore.

Furthermore, the minimum wage is really just a starting point for those entering the workforce. More valuable than the 5.15 an hour are the skills and experience they will gain. This is evident by the fact that more than two thirds of minimum wage earners receive a raise within one year. In other words, they are not doomed to a life of earning the federally mandated minimum, “sharing an apartment or garage [so] they can pay rent and buy food.”

About the best I can do (without making a trip to the library and scouring thru the microfiche) is to plow through the classified ads in the paper I have, and see what turns up (regarding housing and childcare).

Regarding the car issue, yeah, it’s next-to-impossible to make decent comparisons across generations of autos. Was a Charger an entry-level car in 1973? I dunno; I was 2 years old. I don’t think it’s entry-level now, but then, getting financed for something like that often means you need nothing more than a cosigner (read: fool) and a shadow.

This issue also intersects with the car vs public transit issue: although in many if not most places there are busses etc available (and I’ve visited friends in small towns in the south who were shocked to see me show up on a city bus – there’s more than you realize, sometimes!), they just take longer to use. For me, a bookworm with no children yet and working in academia, that’s fine – I love the extra time to read. But if you’re trying to get from work to you kids’ daycare to the grocery store and then home… you’re paying for that extra 45-90min that a bus can add sometimes, literally, often.