CBO: Obama's Higher Minimum Wage Will Kill A Million Jobs

by JASmius

That's on top of the 2.5 million additional jobs that will be destroyed by ObamaCare, on top of the ninety-plus million "discouraged workers" that have already left the labor force, in this bright, sunny age of economic utopia otherwise known as the Obamapression.

I'd love to know where this objective candor has been for the previous five years:

President Barack Obama's plan to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour will cost as many as one million jobs by late 2016, the Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday. 

If Obama and his fellow Democrats are successful in pushing the measure through, the increase would be fully implemented by the end of 2016. It would raise the rate for 16.5 million Americans.

The current minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. The jump to $10.10 over three years represents a near-40% increase.

Obama called for a $10.10 minimum wage in his State of the Union address last month. His plan would see increases this year, next year, and again in 2016 to bring the rate to $10.10. Obama is due to leave the White House in January 2017.

The Senate could begin debating such a bill as early as next month.

Annnnnnd they'll pass it, after Dirty Harry Reid quashes any Republican filibuster by finishing off that one-time "constitutional lynchpin" for good.  I'd like to be able to issue confident assurances that it'll die in the GOP House, but after last week, who knows?

Although the following may be hopeful signs:

Republicans praised the CBO report, saying that it confirmed long-held positions that a higher minimum wage is a job-killer for millions of Americans.

"This report confirms what we've long known: While helping some, mandating higher wages has real costs, including fewer people working," Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, said in a statement. "With unemployment Americans' top concern, our focus should be creating, not destroying, jobs for those who need them most."

Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn of Texas concurred.

"The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office confirmed yet again what we know to be true of government overreach in the marketplace: raising the minimum wage would slash jobs and harm an already fragile workforce," Cornyn said in a statement. "Whether it's Obamacare, a minimum-wage hike or a trillion-dollar stimulus bill charged to the nation's credit card, the bottom line is the president's big-government experiment kills jobs.

"It has made things worse not only for Americans who continue to look for a job, but also for the millions of Americans who have altogether given up looking for work," Cornyn added.

Senator John Thune, the South Dakota chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, said in a statement: "More than 3.5 million Americans have been unemployed for six months or longer, and the percentage of Americans in the labor force is at a low we haven’t seen since Jimmy Carter was president. It’s time to give lower- and middle-income workers a break, not hammer them with more bad policies."

We must, of course, remember that congressional Republican reactions to the latest CBO salvo against Obamanomics are largely, if not entirely, irrelevant, since Barack Obama has his pen and phone and will simply impose this minimum wage hike by Executive decree if Congress doesn't rubber-stamp his bidding.  Because he can "do whatever he wants," and he wants nothing more than to "build ladders into the middle class" by cutting out an additional million of them.

Here's an additional one of O's less-publicized motivations:

The Center for Union Facts analyzed collective-bargaining agreements obtained from the Department of Labor's Office of Labor-Management Standards. The data indicate that a number of unions in the service, retail and hospitality industries peg their base-line wages to the minimum wage. . . . The two most popular formulas were setting baseline union wages as a percentage above the state or federal minimum wage or mandating a flat wage premium above the minimum wage.

And just in case you were wondering whether Big Labor might not object to this full-on, frontal anti-worker assault, concludes Jim Geraghty:

And now you see why raising the minimum wage is such an intense priority for Democrats. A higher minimum wage means higher wages for union workers, which means higher union dues, which gives unions more money to spend during campaign season.

I'm not sure how their motivations will change once King Hussein cancels any further elections.  But I imagine they'll still have jobs outside the Alaska gulag.


UPDATE: The White House's reaction to this latest firestorm?  "Let them eat my shorts".