Life Is Trade-Off. Raising The Minimum Wage And What Conservatives Don't Get

Alan: Yes, conservatives. Yes, Puritans. Yes, oh ye of "Impossibly Pure Principles." This is The Truth: Someone, somewhere, will be hurt by any-and-every political initiative. Inevitable harm is intrinsic to The Human Condition. The Question is whether or not The Greater Good is served. To protect their presumed purity, conservatives -- especially conservative Christians -- want nothing to do with The Greater Good or The Common Good. They only settle for the Impossibility of Perfection and therefore do nothing but impose that inevitably flawed processes of improvement. (In Catholicism, "inevitable harm" falls under the rubric of Original Sin.) 

Today's Numbers: 500,000 and 16.5 million.The first number is the killer of the CBO report. The second is its grace. The former is an estimate of the number of Americans who will lose their jobs if the minimum wage is raised to $10.10, while the latter is the number who will see their income rise.

"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice.  The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization.  We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal.  Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good.  The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”  

"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton

More Merton Quotes

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/04/merton-best-imposed-as-norm-becomes.html

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CBO: Obama's minimum wage plan would cost jobs but reduce poverty. "[T]he CBO found that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour (and then indexing it to inflation) would reduce employment by between a very small amount and 1 million workers, with the agency's best guess being about 500,000 workers...At the same time, the report finds that about 16.5 million low-wage Americans would see an increase in their earnings as a result of the hike in the minimum wage. A much smaller number of higher-wage earners would also see a jump in income, the CBO said...Finally, the CBO report offers a useful historical analogy for the proposed increase. Over the past 30 years, an average of roughly 5.3 percent of workers earned between the old and new minimum wages when Congress legislated a change. This time, under the $10.10 option, 10.1 percent of workers do. That's a testament to not only how far the minimum wage has fallen in real terms but also to how significant the increase would be relative to the size of the workforce." Zachary A. Goldfarb in The Washington Post.

Primary source: Read the CBO report here.

Summary: 5 takeaways from the report. Damian Paletta in The Wall Street Journal.

How the news is spun. "Boosting the minimum wage may cost as many as 500,000 people their jobs, said a new report from Congress's financial scorekeeper that diminishes chances for an agreement on one of President Barack Obama's priorities. The effort by Obama and Senate Democrats to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour already faced opposition in the Republican-led House. Yesterday's report from the Congressional Budget Office provided more fodder for Republicans who have been arguing the proposal would kill jobs...The report also showed that raising the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour may lift about 900,000 Americans out of poverty, supporting Democrats' arguments in favor of the legislation." Michael C. Bender in Bloomberg.

The CBO places its thumb on the scale. "[T]he CBO's methodology is weighed to overstate the impact of a $10.10 minimum wage on jobs, while also understating the benefits. Even then there's a clear tradeoff - a minor fall in jobs for serious real gains again inequality and wage security. Never mind the scary headlines, or the report that unfortunately plays to them: When you consider that the academy is far more ambiguous about the costs of giving the country a raise, and more bullish on the benefits, this is still an excellent deal for working Americans. " Mike Konczal in The New Republic.