Minimum wage law hurts businesses

Published 1:30 am Friday, May 24, 2019

Socialists enjoy replacing freedom with rules. One infamous rule is making perfectly fine jobs illegal. Do promoters admit it causes unemployment? That it creates this huge, dormant field of non-activity. Never!

Year after year millions of eager job seekers are prevented from obtaining hourly paid work at wages employers can afford (without going broke.)

Causing additional damage such as:

Businesses shutting down.

Business owners losing their livelihood.

Useful products and services disappearing.

Reduced tax income for the government.

Price control on wages — a socialist invention — made it happen.

A retired professor in economics/politics, Robert Scott Gassler, recently quoted statistics indicating raising the minimum wage has little or no effect on unemployment.

Inflation likely play a significant role here. My guess was — and is — with each increase some businesses will be forced to fold. In an 2017 analysis of more than a dozen San Francisco Bay-area businesses it was found each $1 increase in the minimum wage was associated with a 14 percent increase in closures for median-rated restaurants. (Effects likely less severe in today’s tight labor market.)

Gunnar Unneland

Shoreline