Three disparate topics: the minimum wage, Obamacare, and illegal immigration. But they’re fundamentally all connected and pointing to considerable uncertainty about the future of our economy.
The minimum wage: people feel as if the economy has changed considerably from the way it was a decade or two ago, when minimum wage-paying jobs were typically held by teenagers getting their first work experience. Or maybe a stay-at-home mom might work a retail job because it provided a flexible schedule — during the day when the kids were at school perhaps, or nights and weekends when dad’s at home. Now there’s broad support for a minimum wage increase because these jobs are no longer perceived of as being teenager’s jobs, but held by adults who have found themselves unable to gain more skills or, even with additional skills, can’t find a higher-paid higher-skilled job.
(Now, granted, around here at least, the nearby McDonald’s is staffed by Mexicans who, one imagines, are more likely to be working with false IDs than not, but that’s not the case at all the various food service and retail jobs around here. And even when I’m shopping on the weekend, there generally aren’t that many younger workers. I know the numbers are still that the majority of minimum wage workers are teens or other secondary earners, but I suppose it’s the “adults” that you notice.)
Do people have confidence that the economy is going to rebound, that well-paid jobs will soon be plentiful again? No — the support for the minimum wage increase is exactly because people are fearful that the jobless recovery is more or less permanent.
And the curious thing is that the Left and the Right are both concerned about the decline in middle-class, or even working-class jobs, but the Left is simultaneously happy to increase the labor supply via legalizing illegal immigrants and providing for new immigration via guest worker programs, and then artificially react with a high minimum wage. But the Right (that is, the “true” Right, not those who are rushing to claim the mantle of “moderate”) wants to let wages be whatever the market dictates, and boost wages by restricting labor supply (that is, opposing guest-worker programs and removing existing and future illegal workers from the labor market through enforcement).
(That’s not to say that I agree with raising the minimum wage — but I understand where the desire comes from.)
And ObamaCare? All the speculation of what the impact ObamaCare will have on the economy comes from a lot of uncertainty about the future economy. Can we rely on all the past paths to success? — certainly a lot of the “adult children” now covered under their parents’ health care plans don’t think so. And the funny thing is that, ironically, it’s the Left, who are ordinarily most concerned with the future of “good jobs,” who are most convinced that all the changes of ObamaCare are not going to have any ill effects — that employers won’t reduce employees to part-time or stay at 49 employees, for instance, or that the Medical Devices Tax won’t impact innovation.
What will happen? We don’t really know what the long-term impact of the trio of globalization, immigration, and automation will be on American workers, and it seems as if the potential impact of those changes in the past has been masked — masked by the trade deficit, and the increased debt that America as a country, and Americans as individuals, have taken on, and masked by all the jobs that we’ve added that haven’t really added any value, increased the well-being of anyone other than the workers in those jobs: the regulators, the tax advisors, the college administrators, for instance. Will we just muddle along indefinitely? There are so many trends that bode ill, and some of the “solutions” I’ve seen don’t really offer much promise — for instance, the notion that the rise of the extremely wealthy will benefit the poor because there will be many jobs created providing services to the wealthy.
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