My solution is stunningly simple: raise the US minimum wage to $500.00 per hour.
That's $20,000 per week for every man jack one of us, without overtime! Voila! After two weeks vacation we've all earned our first million in just one year.
Why hasn't this been considered sooner? Scores of caring public servants have maintained that the higher the minimum wage, the better off is America. (And
Congress too, if Hillary would have her way.)
"We should raise the federal minimum wage again so that working parents can lift their children out of poverty. It is past time to make this investment in our children and families,” said Senator Clinton."
But Hillary, like so many others, has fallen short.
If we ought to legislate a mandatory minimum pay level to meet social need,
then we should step up and do it right. Make us millionaires now.
To be serious, briefly, I would hope that most would conclude that requiring employers to pay no less than $500 an hour would put America out of business over night. (If that won't do it, simply raise the rate to $1,000/hour and if not then, up until the proposal finally seems absurd.) What's my point? Engineers, when evaluating analytical relationships, often test them at their limits. What happens when a key parameter goes to zero? To infinity? If the relationship is sound, the affect at the extremes tends to
make sense. We can learn something about the affect of the variation. We have just applied one end of limit testing to hourly minimum wage. If you agree that a $500/hour minimum wage rate won't work I say you have also (perhaps unwittingly, or involuntarily) agreed to at least two things...
1. The level of the minimum wage set by congress can have a tangible impact on business (and therefore hiring, and therefore earnings).
2. There exists some level of minimum hourly wage (probably less than $500/hour?) at which that rate will hurt business, reduce earnings and hiring. That is, have the opposite affect intended by our well-meaning congressmen.
Or, if we assume for a (risky) moment that our congressmen are not idiots, we may conclude that their championing of a higher minimum wage is first intended to get votes and second, to be set at some level where superficial gains may accrue to a few individuals and the burden to business may not put the economy under.
If you buy none of the above, why then settle for Hillary's and Teddy's proposed $7.25 an hour? We can all be millionaires by September 2007.
