Increasing the Minimum Wage Is Like Hugging a Polar Bear

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Hey, if you are making minimum wage, I've got some good news: Your life is about to change. Yes, it's time to celebrate; you just got a raise — from $6.55 an hour, all the way to $7.25 an hour.

What will you do with all that extra money? Retire? Buy a boat?

Here's The One Thing: Increasing minimum wage is like hugging a polar bear. It looks all cute and cuddly, so you give it a shot. But then it rips your throat out.

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Liberal rags like The New York Times are all for the increase: "The raise is badly needed," they say. But they also say it doesn't go far enough; it needs to be even higher.

President Obama agrees with that assessment. He's regularly voted for wage hikes and on the campaign trail he proposed lifting the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011.

Our current unemployment rate is 9.5 percent. But, it's even worse for teenagers — 24 percent. Worse yet for African-American teenagers — a staggering 38 percent (it goes up to 45 percent if you don't seasonably adjust the numbers.)

And who makes minimum wage?

Teenagers and youth — 53 percent of all minimum wage earners are aged 16 to 24. We've all been there making minimum wage, unless your first job was working the pole at Sluts & Steaks.

What granola-eating-socialists always forget to factor in when supporting jacking up the minimum wage is the employer. I know, those evil profit-driven trolls. People in government just assume the trolls have unending profits and the jobs will always be there.

If the jobs never go away, why not just raise the minimum wage to $50 per hour? That should solve some issues, right?

Of course not. That's why economists are estimating that at least 300,000 jobs will be lost due to the minimum wage hike. That's huge considering only about 2.8 million workers in America earn minimum wage.

So, why would Obama support a policy that directly hurts young people — especially the nearly half of African-American teenagers who are unemployed?

It makes sense if you are trying to transform America.

When Obama comes out and says the stimulus is working as planned — while the economy is tanking — people assume he's either an idiot or he's lying. I don't think it's either.

What happens when kids can't get a job? They become discouraged, disenfranchised. They look for somewhere to land and guess who is now there to swoop in? President Obama and his government programs and community service organizations like AmeriCorps.

Remember Michelle Obama's words:

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MICHELLE OBAMA, 2/18/2008: Barack Obama will require you to work... Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

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Are we to believe she was just kidding or just haphazardly stringing words together?

They are steering our youth into community service. Ted Kennedy and his ilk are even pushing the idea of forced service. They're incentivizing working for the government with promises of paying off college loans. The catch, of course, is you have to federalize your loan before they'll pay it. He wants you to be a bureaucrat slave to government.

I don't know, maybe I'm crazy for going down this road, but from what we already know about Washington, the truth is always stranger than fiction.

The sooner we realize that, the faster we'll be able to stop and go down a road paved with common sense.

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