Higher minimum wage=Poor teenagers. A lesson in the obvious

News flash! Teenage unemployment reached 20.3% in July of 2007, a 15 year high. See this page for the chart. Fewer and fewer young people appear able to get jobs.

Well, on to something completely and absolutely unrelated. Congress raised the minimum wage in July of 2007, with further scheduled increases in July 2008 and July 2009.

There is no connection whatsoever between these two things, as this NCPA study shows (Warning: The previous sentence is dripping with sarcasm.)

Why oh why is this happening? Is it a secret conspiracy? Alien control? Global WARMING!? The answer is simple, but shocking. Businesses do not own money trees! (Except for Microsoft) Please, try to control your shock. This fact, completely unknown to the left, is nonetheless true and has serious consequences.

To demonstrate this, imagine you are a business. You are an evil capitalist, and therefore are in it to make money (also known as profit.) One of the things you need to do this is employees, and because slavery is unfortunately outlawed at the moment, you have to pay them. So, naturally, you pay the little tykes a rate low enough to keep you profitable, but high enough to attract good workers and keep you competetive.

Enter the federal government (Bum bum BUM!) who says you aren't paying them enough, you cold-hearted bastard. They say you now have to pay them x dollars more. This cuts into your profits, and threatens your money making potential. You now have two choices: A) Cut jobs, lowering the overall cost of employment back to it's original level, maintaining profits. B) Increase prices, to pay for increased expenses.

Note there is no choice C) Suddenly discover more money. Chances are you are going to go with A, because it is the least likely to piss off your customers. Thus, higher minimum wage=fewer jobs. So who are we really helping?

But what do I know?