Cambridge City Councilors Send Mixed Messages and Metaphors

Unmentioned is corporations are employing robots or electronic screens instead of paying workers higher wages. How long before robots are elected to the council? Mr. Mazen does not mention higher prices, called inflation, due to higher minimum wages. He sounds almost delusional expecting what the council does to affect national policy. Saying it is a moral issue, speakers do not identify how and why. Is the morality evil for society. businesses and some workers? Councilor Simmons mixes metaphors arguing for more bandwith counter to the net neutrality movement. Has she flipped?

[From article]
a task force be charged with establishing recommendations on the ideal minimum wage in Cambridge, and how to best implement the increase without creating unintended consequences in Cambridge or elsewhere.
[. . .]



“I’ve seen incredible results. Businesses by virtue of raising wages and raising their costs ever so slightly have seen no decrease in business, but increase in revenue,” Mazen said.
[. . .]
seeking to conquer things bigger than just Cambridge, Mazen said. This move can help push the issue at a state and possibly federal level, he said.
[. . .]
During public comment, many residents said this was a moral issue
[. . .]
Mayor Simmons said it’s important to look at how income affects affordable housing and how they are related.
[. . .]



raising the minimum wage, which she said gives Cambridge more bandwidth

http://cambridge.wickedlocal.com/news/20160622/cambridge-task-force-formed-for-15-raising-minimum-wage-called-moral-move

Cambridge task force formed for $15; raising minimum wage called a 'moral' move
By Natalie Handy
nhandy (at) wickedlocal.com
Posted Jun. 22, 2016 at 8:55 AM
CAMBRIDGE Chronicle

Cambridge, MA City Councilor Wants $15 minimum Wage By Any Means Necessary

“I’m not super concerned with how we implement it,” Mazen said. “What I am concerned with is the absolute imperative to increase wages in the city.” There's an un-American theory of government. Under that standard police could eliminate drunk driving, domestic violence, rape, and drug use in Cambridge by beating anyone they see doing it until they are senseless. That's the way to implement policy determined by personal mandate. Did Councilor Mazen learn this system of legislating at MIT?

[From article]
“I’m not super concerned with how we implement it,” Mazen said. “What I am concerned with is the absolute imperative to increase wages in the city.” There's an un-American theory of government. Under that standard police could eliminate drunk driving, domestic violence, rape, and drug use in Cambridge by beating anyone they see doing it until they are senseless. That's the way to implement policy determined by personal mandate. Did Councilor Mazen learn this system of legislating at MIT?

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/11/24/cambridge-minimum-wage-effort/

City Councillor Leads Effort Advocating $15 Minimum Wage
It remains unclear whether such a policy shift would affect some of Harvard’s temporary and part-time employees
By HANNAH NATANSON, CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Harvard Crimson
November 24, 2015

Minimum Wages Hurt Small Businesses

[From article]
“If the restaurant suddenly has to pay for something it didn’t have to pay before, one way to cover that cost is to raise menu prices,” Kevin Connelly says. “So we are probably going to have to pay more for that shrimp.”
And that, says Eve Connelly, will have a ripple effect. Higher prices mean people go out less often, which means less in tips for the wait staff at Leonardo’s II. “I wonder if this is something the politicians understand,” she says.
[. . .]

"What I keep trying to drive home is that we are forced into paying costs we never had to cover before in addition to the minimum wage increase that is already in motion,” he says. “This will cripple the restaurant industry. This is especially true for start-ups and other borderline businesses operating at the margins.”
[. . .]

“This is an easy issue to demagogue,” he says. “If this bill does go through it will mean higher consumer costs and less business in restaurants, which works to the disadvantage of the very workers the politicians say they are trying to help.”

http://dailysignal.com/2014/10/01/new-jersey-minimum-wage-proposals/

Mom-and-Pop Restaurants Feel Pinch of Minimum Wage Hike



Kevin Mooney / @KevinMooneyDC / October 01, 2014 /

Mob Rule and The Minimum Wage

[From article]
There is nothing democratic about mob rule. It means that some people's votes are to be overruled by other people's disruptions, harassments and threats.
The latest examples are the mobs in the streets in cities across the country, demanding that employers pay a minimum wage of $15 an hour, or else that the government makes them do so by law. Some of the more gullible observers think the issue is whether what some people are making now is "a living wage." This misconstrues the whole point of hiring someone to do work. Those who are being hired are paid for the value of the work they do.

[. . .]
In 1948, the year I left home, the unemployment rate among black 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds was 9.4 percent, slightly lower than that for white kids the same ages, which was 10.2 percent.
Over the decades since then, we have gotten used to unemployment rates among black teenagers being over 30 percent, 40 percent or in some years even 50 percent. Such is the price of political "compassion."
Whatever the good intentions behind minimum wage laws, what matters are the actual consequences. Many people have ideological, financial or political incentives to obfuscate the consequences.[. . .]
Minimum wage rates that are higher than what most low-skilled and inexperienced workers are worth simply price those workers out of the job markets, leaving more work for union members. All the unions have to do is camouflage what is happening by using rhetoric about "a living wage," or "social justice" or whatever else will impress the gullible.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell090914.php3

Mob Rule Economics

By Thomas Sowell
Published Sept. 9, 2014

Billboard Upset Liberal Activist

[From article]
The billboard just educates people about reality. If you raise the cost of labor, then it becomes economical to replace labor with automation, in this case touch screens, which are declining in cost as labor prices itself out of the market through high minimum wages.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/07/hilarious_lefty_flips_out_over_billboard_explaining_consequences_of_15_minimum_wage.html

July 20, 2014
Hilarious: lefty flips out over billboard explaining consequences of $15 minimum wage
By Thomas Lifson

Obama's Misguided Income Arguments

[From article]
For people having limited thinking skills, differences in earnings cannot be explained away. For them, Congress has permitted — and even fostered — a misallocation of people by race, sex and ethnicity. They'll argue that courts have consistently concluded that "gross" disparities are probative of a pattern and practice of discrimination. So what to do? Maybe President Obama and Congress should require women, who are overrepresented in preschool and kindergarten teaching, to become boilermakers, garbage collectors and brick masons and mandate that male boilermakers, trash collectors and brick masons become preschool and kindergarten teachers until both of their percentages are equal to their percentages in the population. You say, "Williams, to do that would be totalitarianism!" I say that if Americans accept that Congress can force us to buy health insurance, how much more totalitarian would it be for Congress to force people to take jobs they don't want?

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns042314.php3#.U2RKNl75j0A

Jewish World Review 

April 23, 2014 / 23 Nissan, 5774
Wage Discrimination
By Walter Williams

Minimum Wage is Not Advanced Technology

[From article]
To get your minimum wage increased, you first have to have a minimum-wage job.
[. . .]
The assumption is that mass, multigenerational dependency is now a permanent feature of life.
[. . .]
And, if you’re wondering why every Big Government program assumes you’re a feeble child, that’s because a citizenry without “work and purpose” is ultimately incompatible with liberty.
[. . .]
the signature achievement of Obama’s “hope and change” combines 1940s British public health theories with 1970s Soviet supermarket delivery systems.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1213/steyn120913.php3#.UqYzGd00i6Y

Jewish World Review
December 9, 2013 / 6 Teves, 5774
Inequality far worse than economic
By Mark Steyn

Minimum Wages Hurt Black Teenagers

[From article]
It would be sheer lunacy to attempt to explain these more favorable employment statistics by suggesting that during earlier periods, blacks faced less racial discrimination. What best explains the loss of teenage employment opportunities are increases in minimum wage laws. There's little dispute within the economics profession that higher minimum wages discriminate against the employment of the least skilled worker. Such a demographic is disproportionately represented by black teenagers.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns101613.php3#.UmC4F900jDo
   
Jewish World Review
Oct. 16, 2013/ 13 Mar-Cheshvan, 5774
Racial Trade-offs: Part II
By Walter Williams

New Book from MIT on Minimum Wages

New Book from MIT on Minimum Wages

A new book published by MIT and written by economists concludes that minimum wage laws reduce employment opportunities for less-skilled workers, reduce their earnings, do not reduce poverty, and have long-term adverse effects on wages and earnings by reducing the acquisition of human capital.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11659

December 2008
$40.00
ISBN-10: 0-262-14102-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-262-14102-4
Minimum Wages
David Neumark and William L. Wascher