Since the movement wouldn’t have much of a sales angle without pretty-sounding ideas, progressivism has never been short on fanciful proposals.
And of all the lullabies floated by the left recently, the most popular ear-tickler has to be raising the minimum wage. Because it’s so easy, you know.
Just get those mean old, so-called “job-creators” to fork out a few more dollars per hour from the pools of cash they go swimming in every night, and voila, income disparities will magically disappear. Right?
Actually, no. Far from it.
There are plenty of problems with that simplistic rationale, and if you’d like to see some holes shot in the “raising the minimum wage should be super easy” philosophy, you should read (or re-read) Clint Cooper’s Sept. 13 Free Press editorial titled “Chattanooga Minimum-Wage Rise Negatives Would Outweigh The Positives.” It’s spot on from start to finish.
I would encourage our city leaders – the ones who so hastily rallied to the minimum wage banner a couple of weeks ago – to look westward for an example of the fate awaiting an attempt to increase worker pay.
The cautionary tale comes from a different Gig City: Kansas City – the original Google Fiber market.
Earlier this week, a Missouri judge ruled that a petition initiative to increase the city minimum wage to $15 per hour be stripped from a pending November ballot.
How did that issue end up on a ballot in the first place? City leaders ignored a state law that prohibits municipalities from autonomously raising wages, copying places like Seattle and San Francisco.
Sound familiar?
Hand it to Kansas City wage-increase advocates, though. The were opportunistic, originally approving the ballot language while the governor and the legislature battled over the minimum wage law. In the end, though, the state’s general assembly overrode a gubernatorial veto and the law was finalized, giving the legislature final say on such deliberations.
Here in this Gig City, a few City Council members have promised us that regardless of a similar Tennessee law, which prohibits cities from establishing independent wage baselines, they’re going to, as Councilman Moses Freeman puts it, “move forward and examine this” topic.
Freeman was quoted as saying he was “incensed, incredulous and irritated that our state legislature would remove that authority from us,” once he learned about the 2-year-old law – after he announced his proposal to increase wages, of course.
Undeterred, the City Council plans to hold wage hearings in October while some members have pledged to put pressure on Hamilton County’s delegation to Nashville. In the meantime, city attorney Wade Hinton has been ordered on an apparent wild goose chase by the council to go ahead and draft a bill once he’s done with his minimum wage research.
Let’s hope this is nothing more than political grandstanding, that our council members aren’t really serious about trying to sidestep state law. A challenge would not only be incredibly misguided, since it would ultimately fail, but it would also be unnecessarily costly.
Referendum votes – where this would likely end up if pursued – aren’t free. The one in Kansas City would’ve cost taxpayers an estimated half-million dollars to execute. Though it wouldn’t be nearly as expensive here, a moot ballot would be a monstrous fiscal waste.
This whole episode needs to end once all this chest-puffing is done.
It’s faulty enough to think that raising the minimum wage will be a quick fix to economic inequity. Worse, fighting state law will prove to be a fruitless endeavor whose sole achievement will be to distract our council from other important matters that fall well within their jurisdiction.
David Allen Martin is a syndicated columnist who writes from Chattanooga. Email him at davidallenmartin423@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @DMart423.