Consider Upping Minimum Wage
Want to reduce crowding in America’s schools? Here’s a modest proposal:
Boost the minimum wage.
It’s true. A major new study documents two unintended but very real consequences of increasing the minimum wage: a decline in the number of teens in school and an increase in teen unemployment.
Minimum wage hikes in the 1970s and 1980s “lead to a decline in the school enrollment rate and an increase in the proportion of teen-agers who are neither employed nor enrolled,” reported economists David Neumark of Michigan State University and William Wascher, a member of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System, in the latest Journal of Business and Economic Statistics.
Their research suggests hiking the minimum wage by about 20 percent as President Clinton has proposed may entice large numbers of teens to quit school to become hamburger-flippers, car washers and so forth.
That increase, says Neumark, would boost the number of working teens who are not in school by more than 5 percent. Likewise, the number of 16- to 19-year-olds who are not in school and not working would rise by a whopping 12.8 percent.
The researchers suspect teens who otherwise would have remained in school force out marginally qualified younger workers, boosting unemployment.
Actually, many economists believe a minimum wage increase will do little to help the truly poor but will produce a windfall for the sons, daughters and part-time working spouses of the middle class. That’s because an estimated 59 percent of the benefit from hiking the minimum wage from $4.25 to $5 an hour would go to people in families with household incomes of at least twice the poverty level, said economist Richard Burkhauser of Syracuse University.
“Most minimum wage workers are not poor,” said Burkhauser, who favors giving the working poor earned income tax credits instead of hiking the minimum wage.
The wiz poll: hey, babe … hey, jerk!
Congratulations, gentlemen. We’re doing better. Much better. But, HELLO! Some of us still don’t get it: Most women really dislike being called “chick” or “babe” or “bitch,” despite what Wayne and Garth and those gangsta rappers may believe.
A new survey asked a random sample of Americans whether each of 10 words was appropriate or inappropriate for men to use when referring to women they did not know. “Bitch” and “broad” topped the list of unsuitable words, with more than eight out of 10 persons surveyed rating them as “very inappropriate.” (The real news in these numbers is that 2 percent thought “bitch” was an appropriate way to refer to women and 4 percent - again, mostly guys - said “broad” was just fine, too.)
Men and women had modestly different ideas of what was appropriate. Younger people were more tolerant of “babe,” while older Americans were more accepting of words like “honey” and “girl.”
xxxx Terms of endearment - not Percentage who say word is “very inappropriate” for men to use in referring to women they did not know: Word Total Men Women Lady 5 4 6 Girl 20 16 24 Gal 26 23 29 Honey 44 39 49 Darling 49 42 55 Sweetie 52 48 56 Babe 63 57 68 Chick 68 64 72 Broad 85 80 89 Bitch 93 91 94 Source: Washington Post national survey of 1,004 randomly selected adults conducted June 9-13. 950702 MORI2-FX
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