Minimum Wage

I'm not a fan of Mitt Romney, although I'd prefer him over Gingrich. But, I came across this article on CBSnews.com: Club for Growth doesn't like Romney's minimum wage stance. The short of it is that Romney has a fairly progressive attitude toward wages, and does believe in a minimum wage. Although I know it's not anything new, it still does surprise me when I hear Republicans wanting wages to be completely left to the free market.

Why, you ask? Because businesses have proven time and time again that they really can't be trusted any more than anyone else. Sure, we want business to grow. But don't we also want fewer people on welfare? I think that the current wage standards are more than reasonable from a business standpoint, although still pretty impossible to really live on.

We keep seeing such experiments every time Republicans are in power. Remember Bush's "trickle down" philosophies? Remember how the only thing to trickle down was a stream of urine from the rich? I hate to sound like I'm just spouting liberal propaganda here, but this is simple greed. The rich want to get richer, and they don't care whose heads they step on on their way up. And, news flash: the economy really didn't improve under Bush. Instead, we kept seeing a steady stream of jobs leaving the US from greedy companies whose executives only cared about making more money.

The problems that come from a minimum wage (and increases in it) are this: in a perfect world, when the minimum wage is increased, the business owners might slap their foreheads and say, "holy shit, what have we been doing to our workers? I guess I can accept a little less pay this year." That seems to be what people expect when they hear of a minimum wage increase.

But what actually happens is, "shit, I'm not giving up my money. Guess I better make some lay-offs and jack up prices." So, we have increased unemployment and price inflation as a result.

It might seem like the solution would be to set a maximum wage. But no, that would be counterproductive. I don't want to punish people for being rich; I have nothing against the rich. I want to discourage greed. I don't use "greedy" and "rich" interchangeably. Hell, I'd like to be rich... but I don't see myself being greedy. Perhaps then the solution could be setting wages at percentages? To give an extreme example, imagine a CEO deciding him and the board of executives gets 90% of the company's money for wages, leaving the remaining 10% to be split among everyone else - the manufacturers, the customer service, the marketing, the accountants, the engineers, etc. Not very fair, right? Start with adjusting those percentages until they are more fair. I'm willing to still let the owners and execs have the lion's share, but not to the point of starving everyone else. For the companies, it would have the advantage of encouraging better work and loyalty from the employees, as they would see the more direct results of their success or failure. Seems also that it may take some of the point out of being greedy.