The Morning Dispatch: The Minimum-Wage Wars

Plus: Republican state legislatures try to crack down on absentee voting.

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Happy Thursday! We’re sorry for doubling up in your inbox this morning—your a.m. editor accidentally stuck Danielle Pletka’s interview with Wang Xiyue, an American imprisoned in Iran for 40 months, in the wrong office pneumatic tube, sending it out as an email rather than simply posting it to the site. (The interview itself is terrific, by the way—and while that’s not why we sent it, it’s well worth your time.)

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • An analysis by the Food and Drug Administration found that Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose COVID-19 vaccine raised no safety concerns, was very effective at preventing severe illness and death from the virus, and likely limits transmission. The FDA could authorize the vaccine for emergency use as early as this weekend, and Johnson & Johnson has said it will have 20 million doses available by the end of March.

  • Neera Tanden’s path to leading the Office of Management and Budget took a further hit yesterday when two Senate committees postponed hearings surrounding her nomination. “It didn’t look like she had the votes,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said.

  • U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton granted a preliminary injunction on Tuesday blocking President Biden’s 100-day moratorium on most deportations. Tipton had previously instituted a 14-day restraining order preventing Biden’s order from being enforced.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Lydia Joy Burgdorf

    My first minimum wage job in 1977 paid the sum of $1.85 an hour. I worked in my college cafeteria. I used their work - study program so for most of the semester, my wages were used to offset the "board" portion of my bill. About two thirds of the way through the semester, I would start to get a pay check which I would squirrel away for the next semester.

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    Dave Conant - MO

    I worked for a long time as a server and bartender at tipped minimum wage and, as is not uncommon in those positions, my paycheck was largely irrelevant. I learned to budget and not to go immediately after work to the nearest bar and spend it all. That said, I think a federal minimum wage based on what works in major markets is economically unsound but, given that the effective minimum where I am now is $9.25, some increase along the lines of the Romney/Cotton bill is in order.

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    Jeanne A

    Yes. I worked a minimum wage job from 2006 to 2011 I had stepped away from my full time job to take care of my husband after a heart attack and stroke. After a couple of years of touch and go with him he stabilized enough for me to work part time mostly to get out a bit. I found a job at a bookstore which was lovely and fun and paid $7.00 an hour. I worked there for 5 years. I was making $7.25 when I left.

    I loved working there, but it did require some knowledge of books and topics. Not everyone is reading romance, sci-fi/fantasy, or thrillers. It’s hard to find people who have the knowledge to work in a bookstore and the willingness or ability to work for that pitiful wage. I’m only got to work there because we had enough income other than the bookstore to live on.

    Being retail, I worked only part-time hours and at minimum wage. Everyone I worked with except the manager and assistant manager had multiple jobs just to stay alive.

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    TimNYC

    Back in the mid-2000's, I was a camp counselor, to various groups of boys aged pre-k through age 3. I made $7.25 an hour, and it was enough to provide personal spending money for me throughout the year in high school and in college — but my earnings there, working all summer, would not have been enough to pay more than one month's rent and food in my local area (NYC suburb, at the time) — and only even that much if I'd had a roommate to split the rent with.

    I loved working with the kids, though; enough that I considered going to college to become a teacher. Ultimately, I decided not to go that path, but I'm young enough that I could still change, and do sometimes think about it.

    And I was pretty darn good with them, too — one year, I distinctly remember, a young camper hugging me around the waist on the last day and crying because he didn't want to leave. Still melts my heart to remember, all these years later.

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    Jen

    Not sure where to ask this but I would appreciate if someone at TD would do a write-up of Xavier Becerra and why he would be terrible for HHS. The media is choosing to focus on Neera Tanden over him and I think it’s mostly because covering him would require uncomfortable conversations about his extreme positions on abortion and assaults on freedom of speech and religious liberty. This guy is a complete disaster yet all the beltway buzz is about Tanden.

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      Richard Maxton

      She's the easy out. I think it's gonna come down to one or the other and I'd much rather it be him out. . . and I say that as someone who can't stand Neera Tanden.

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    Julie from Texas

    When I worked minimum wage, it was $5.25 an hour. I had to be able to type 45 wpm, had a dress code, and had to pay for a bus pass to get into work. Meanwhile, a friend of mine worked as a baggage thrower (that's how he described it) for Eastern Airlines (remember them?) which was unionized and paid $14 per hour. SMH.

    Now, I pay a virtual assistant a few hours a month for my own business. She wanted to charge me $11.50 per hour (what she was paid by others), and I told her I'd pay no less than $12 per hour, because our local Chick-Fil-A was paying that! I have since increased her fee, but I don't think I could keep up with $15 an hour. Sad but true. I just don't make enough for writing and speaking myself to make a VA worth it at that rate.

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  7. deathtomcmansions

    Yes, I worked a minimum wage job. I think it was in the range of $2.50 or so -- rather a while ago. It wasn't a fast food job, and actually involved a fair amount of responsibility and autonomy, but I was still a teenager and hadn't learned anything about asking for a raise based on results etc. So for that reason I was rather pleased there was a minimum as my boss probably wouldn't have paid even that much without the law being what it was. He certainly made comments to that effect when the minimum wage was raised by a nickel or so.

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    George.Skinner

    I had a couple of minimum wage jobs. One was working at Radio Shack, and the other one was working as a submarine captain at an attraction in a shopping mall. Getting to operate a functioning submarine went some way to compensate for the lousy pay, but I was pretty certain that if the mall management were allowed to pay us less, they would've. Anyway, that was a summer in a particularly lousy economy where university students were happy to take whatever they could get to help with tuition for the next year.

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    Chris Jenkins

    One thing that I find interesting about the minimum wage debate: among mainstream media types, there is a lot of talk that there is a consensus among economists that raising the minimum wage won't have any negative effects. Joe Biden said it (and The Dispatch ran a fact check on it), Chris Hayes tweeted yesterday that there is no substantive argument against the minimum wage. I've read new articles that say the same. I've seen progressive friends of mine say it on social media. This seems just bonkers to me.

    My undergraduate degree is in economics, and I came away from that experience with almost the exact opposite idea - that among economists, there was very little support for the minimum wage, and that it was a policy popular among the masses who didn't understand economics very well. Now I get that this is probably too simplistic, but it strikes me as nuts that just 15 years later, the exact opposite idea is starting to take hold.

    My current understanding is that there have been a couple studies in the last decade or so that showed that, under very specific circumstances, modest minimum wage increases don't necessarily have impacts that are net negative. I have seen nothing that indicates that there is a consensus, or anything close to it, among economists that minimum wage increases, regardless of size, are a net positive, or even that minimum wage increases are harmful only if they are significantly large.

    This is what I think is happening: Paul Krugman has always taken the position (in his column, at least), that right-leaning or libertarian economists are hacks that should not be taken seriously. Other left-leaning economists have taken his lead, and since most mainstream media members are left-leaning, their economist sources are so as well, this idea that there is a consensus among economists on certain left-wings economic policies spreads like wildfire.

    It shocks me that they get away with it, since it's so far from the truth. Everything I've seen indicates that the actual consensus is that minimum wage increases that are too big can have serious negative effects on the economy, and the disagreement centers around what size of increase is too big, and what exactly the negative effects are.

    There are still many credible, serious economists that are libertarian or right-leaning. Most of the professors in my econ program were at least a little libertarian-ish. Many get published in mainstream newspapers and magazines. Nobel prizes have been won by libertarian and right-leaning economists. This just all seems so strange, and pretty dishonest to me.

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      DougCLE

      "Paul Krugman has always taken the position (in his column, at least), that right-leaning or libertarian economists are hacks that should not be taken seriously."

      There's a reason that Jonah always talks about "scooping up the 'Paul Krugman columns' his dogs leave in the backyard". PK is a decent enough economist when he stays in his lane, though my favorite line about him is that he "predicted 9 of the last 0 recessions", but he is a walking Dunning–Kruger effect.

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  10. Ben Bobbitt

    "...Raising the federal minimum wage is very popular—83 percent of respondents in a recent Harris poll believe $7.25 per hour is not “enough for an individual to live on”...

    I hate that construction. Just because someone may agree that $7.25 an hour is not enough to live on, it does not logically follow that the minimum wage should be raised, nor does an affirmative response to the question "is that enough to live on?" in a poll equal approval of a minimum wage increase.

    When I worked my first job for minimum wage, I was a 16 year old kid with no living expenses beyond pizza and gas money. Not every job should necessarily pay enough to live on. It has nothing to do with the dignity of the individual, it has to do with economic reality. Some jobs are not worth that much money and will simply vanish.

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