On the Minimum Wage

1) Forcing an employer to pay a worker $9 an hour (and, really, why be so damned miserly about it - $15 an hour would obviously be better and much more "stimulative", no?) when that worker only produces $7.25 an hour is nonsensical economics. We really need to get off of this price-fixing bullshit and focus a hell of a lot more on economic growth. I mean, just look at Hong Kong and Singapore. Those countries didn't minimum wage themselves to prosperity, now did they?............2) As for all of these studies that supposedly support the minimum wage, the one that most liberal politicians seem to point to as the gold-standard is the one from the '90s by Alan Krueger and David Card that studies fast-food restaurants in New Jersey....Yeah, well, guess what, folks, it's flawed, majorly flawed. It seems as if these two authors (as devastatingly pointed out by David Neumark, William Wascher, Mark Schweitzer, and may other economists) never actually drew their data from the payroll records of the restaurants that they claimed to have studied. Nope, what they did instead was to get their data strictly from interviewing the managers and even with this technique they ended up getting a third of their data points wrong. Needless to say, their conclusion were way off and the minimum wage (increase) actually did increase unemployment when compared to the control state (Pennsylvania).............3) And then of course you have clowns like Jared Bernstein and Paul Krugman going around saying that the minimum wage doesn't even hurt teenagers, this despite the fact that teenage unemployment has consistently been double to triple that of adults. Easily batting this one away, economist Robert Murphy did a quick comparison of the teenage unemployment rates between those states that had a higher minimum wage than the federal minimum wage and those states that did not. His findings were thus: Those states that had a higher minimum wage than that of the federal government (there was a grand total of 19 of them) had an overall teenage unemployment rate of 25.2% while those that did not have a higher minimum wage than that of the federal government had an overall teenage unemployment rate of 21.5%....So, there it is, folks. Those states that jacked up the minimum wage had a 17% HIGHER teenage unemployment rate than those states which did not. Not that this is any sort of scientific proof of causality, mind you, but you gotta know that if the results had gone the other way the pro minimum wage folks would be singing it from the mountain tops.............4) Murphy (http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2013/02/i-get-empirical-on-minimum-wage.html) also looked at the distribution of these states and found that a) six of the top eight states in terms of teenage unemployment were precisely those that had a higher minimum wage than the federal rate and b) only two of the bottom (i.e., those states that had the lowest teenage unemployment rate) 18 states in terms of teenage unemployment had a higher minimum wage than the federal rate. Again, it doesn't look all that good for the pro minimum wage advocates here.