Raise the Minimum Wage. Don't Raise It

What a debate.

Rather than raise the minimum wage, perhaps we should cap the maximum wage. But that's not expedient for politicians. Nor is it palatable for the mavens of Wall Street and neither is it the topic of this essay.

So let's examine the minimum wage debate instead.

The minimum wage debate is so predictable. So is the thinking of the proponents and the opponents. In their stance, they are not only predictable; they are also dogmatic.

Liberals want it raised. Conservatives want it capped or eliminated.

Liberals want to be pedagogues. Conservatives want to be gods.

Liberals say workers should get a living wage.

Conservatives say that raising the minimum wage will eliminate jobs.

Liberals persuade liberal economists to back their argument. Conservatives buy conservative economists to back their argument. And there's no need to mention the jesters – the media – who parrot their masters and scorn their opponents.

Neither side is wrong and neither side is right.

Economists of all persuasions have studied the issue if not ad infinitum at least ad nauseum. Further discussion only substantiates the idiom that doing the same thing again and again is insanity. If not insanity, cynics say, it is an attempt to gain viewers and rally voters., If this is a sane discussion, we're on the edge of apocalyptic collapse. But sanity, according to many of the insane, is overrated.

Yet American workers are facing the brunt of an economy in flux.

The problem, as some would say, is that housing and food prices are rising while wages have remain stagnant. It is true: they have. Even the homeless wandering the streets of Ghent could tell you that.

The economy, despite the numerical gyrations emanating from the White House, isn't improving and really hasn't improved since the financial meltdown in 2008.

In economic upheavals, a shakeout occurs. Companies streamline. They cut jobs and redundant functions. They outsource. This isn't anything new. What we see is a new economy; some might call it a sharing economy, an unfortunate tag.

Yet workers are struggling. That wages are torpid isn't an enigma.

Let's examine the up and down of wages.

Raise the minimum wage. Yet it won't be long before your landlord or bank, your friendly utility company and your corporate American grocer – all of them subsidized via tax credits, tax loopholes, price supports, tax write offs for debt – will elevate prices to grab a cut of your wages.

So what happens then?

Do we keep raising wages? If that's case, we'll be caught in an endless cycle of rising wages and rising prices – in other words, inflation.

Yet the minimum wage has yet to lift a family of four above the poverty threshold, according to numerous studies.

Here are some facts about the minimum wage, published by the Pew ResearchCenter.

Since 2009, the minimum wage lost 6 percent of its purchasing power due to inflation.

Just over half of the 3.55 million U.S. workers who were at or below the federal minimum last year are ages 16 to 24, the Center said in its analysis.

An additional 20.3 percent are ages 25 to 34, according to the Center's analysis. That 3.55 million represents about 2.8 percent of all wage and salary workers.

The minimum wage is not a living wage. It is a wage to subsist, not to sustain.