Thomas Lucente: Fast-food workers not worth $15 an hour

Let’s be clear: No task your average fast-food worker does is worth $15 an hour.

That does not stop the loony left from continuing to advocate for higher minimum wages for fast-food workers.

In the mind of your typical leftist, everything in the world is segregated from everything else so actions, in their minds, have no consequences beyond that intended. For example, the left seems to think of economics in a static sort of way where raising taxes by 1 percent actually increases revenue by 1 percent. They seem to have the inability to understand that humans change their behavior based on their circumstances.

Take the push for a minimum wage of $15 an hour for fast-food workers. Ignoring the fact that their work is not worth that much money, there are significant real-world consequences for for such an action.

The end result would be higher prices and increased unemployment.

A study by James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation found that a minimum wage of $15 an hour for fast-food workers would result in 77 percent decline in profits, a 36 percent decline in sales, a 36 percent decline in hours worked, and a 38 percent increase in prices. That’s right, a 38 percent increase in prices. Given the average price of a Big Mac from McDonald’s in the United States in July was $4.80, a 38 percent increase in prices would bring the cost of a Big Mac to $6.62.

Or, as Sherk put it, “These changes would hurt consumers. Americans would face higher fast-food prices, putting a dent into the budgets of everyone who frequently eats fast food — primarily moderate-income consumers, not the wealthy, who do not regularly eat fast food.”

Meanwhile, the owner of your average fast-f00d restaurant will have to settle for an average profit of just $6,100 a year in order to stay in business. Oh, but today’s leftists don’t care that the owner of the business, the person who has taken all the risk, is only earning $6,100 a year while the teenager flipping hamburgers is making $15 an hour.

Indeed, the argument over the minimum wage is silly because it is not really a problem, at least not based on the number of people actually earning minimum wage. The left likes to promote the age-old myth of the single mother trying to raise a family on minimum wage. But it simply isn’t true.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there are about 3.6 million workers making minimum wage, which is only about 2.5 percent of all workers.

But even that is not the full story. Of those 3.6 million workers, 31 percent are teenagers and 55 percent are 25 years old or younger, the most inexperienced of America’s workers. That means only about 0.8 percent of Americans over 25 earn only the minimum wage.

Even more telling is that a study last year showed that 63 percent of workers who earn less than $9.50 per hour are the second or third earner in their family and 43 percent of these workers live in households that earn over $50,000 per year.

Are we really willing as a society to bankrupt businesses and hurt middle class families to give a questionable benefit at less than 1 percent of American workers who probably earn what they do because of their own bad decisions or because they are simply a family’s second income?

Yet, somehow, the loony left ignores reality and continues to push for the increased minimum wage. That’s because this falls in line with their mentality that there is conflict between workers and managers.

What they don’t seem to understand is that anything that harms the corporations, harms the workers. For example, our punitive corporate tax rate, the highest in the world, hurts the workers, not the corporations. As does our overly burdensome regulatory regime. It is why companies leave this country.

The reality is — and what the left never understands — that the best, and only, way to help the American worker, as well as the U.S. economy, is to make sure corporations succeed.