‘Lifting the Minimum Wage’

Weinstein tells us that raising the minimum wage will harm the very people we would be trying to help, by eliminating 300,000 jobs. He proposes instead to expand the earned-income tax credit (EITC) program, which gives a tax refund to low-income workers.

Weinstein makes a good case for more EITC funds: No jobs will be lost because the money comes from federal funds; EITC is only available to low-income families with dependent children, so middle-class teen-agers who don’t need the money to survive are not eligible. However, what he has forgotten is that there are many adults working for minimum wage who do not have children. EITC does nothing for these needy people.

Consider a young man working for the minimum wage 40 hours a week, 52 weeks per year. His expected income is not even $7,000 per year, far below the poverty line. He is caught in a vicious circle: Unable to take time off from work, barely subsisting on $134 per week, he cannot take the time to improve his situation. Stuck in a job he can’t afford to quit, he finds that although his pay rate stays the same, inflation never sleeps. Ultimately, he may decide that collecting welfare is a far more profitable enterprise. Weinstein states that “Anyone--wealthy or poor--earning near the minimum wage who keeps a job wins.” Is this the American dream?

As adults quit their jobs to collect unemployment, these jobs will open for the same middle-class teen-agers who need them the least. By making unemployment more lucrative than employment, we may very well end up with a surplus of EITC funds, since welfare recipients are just as ineligible for those funds as teen-agers are. An expanded EITC program will do little in such a case.

Weinstein’s plan is well-intentioned, but shortsighted. We will eventually have to raise the $3.35 minimum standard to conform to the rest of industry. The longer we wait, and the greater the difference between the two, the greater will be the shock to employers when they are forced to change.

Weinstein is correct--EITC is a good program, and increased funds will help low-income workers, but it is not a panacea for the below-poverty wage earners. Coupled with a realistic minimum wage for today’s world, it may reduce the bare subsistence cycle which makes many American workers little more than modern-day sharecroppers.

DOUGLAS A. CREWS

San Diego