MacIver Institute falsely compares Minimum Wage hikes to Unemployment.

The MacIver Institute would like you to believe a whole list of silly minimum wage fictions, if they’re ever going to change your mind on the fair price for labor. But this is now getting ridiculous.

Take for example this giant piece of denial:

Brett Healy, President of the MacIver Institute, released the following statement regarding Raise Up MKE’s effort to increase the minimum wage to $15.00 per hour:

“Minimum wage jobs were never meant to be family-supporting jobs. A minimum wage job is a place where you get your foot in the door, learn what it means to show up on time, be courteous to customers and rise up the ranks through your hard work. A minimum wage job is a starting point, not a career.”

Where has this guy been for the last couple of decades? Supposing minimum wages jobs weren't meant to support families, that's just what they've become. And what makes it perfectly acceptable to pay even entry level employees slave wages? Isn't that the real issue they're trying to muck up with these false comparison?

MacIver would also like you believe Raise Up MKE has all the power of the states corporate business lobby and then some. WMC is now quivering in their boots:

“I wish these young people could see that Raise Up MKE is concerned about only one thing, brute political power. Raise Up MKE does not care about the well-being of these young people.

We wouldn't want labor to have political power, would we. And really, raising the minimum wage means they don't care. But MacIver isn't done lying yet. Discounting decades of deregulation and trade agreements that off shored manufacturing, not to mention the job killing Great Recession, our new low wage service economy can now be blamed on the minimum wage. They are truly insane:

“Since 2002 the minimum wage in Wisconsin has increased from $5.15 per hour to the current $7.25 per hour; meanwhile, the unemployment rate for Wisconsin teens has increased from 15.5 to 19.8, an increase of 27.7 percent over the decade. The higher you artificially inflate the minimum wage, the higher the unemployment rate for teenagers. 

A big lie, and research backs that up. 

Think Progress: There are at least five different academic studies focusing on increases to the minimum wage—including increases ranging from 7 percent to 12.3 percent made during periods of high unemployment—that find an increase in the minimum wage has no significant effect on employment levels.
 A simple analysis of increases to the minimum wage on the state level, even during periods of state unemployment rates above 8 percent, shows that the minimum wage does not kill jobs. Indeed the states in our simple analysis had job growth slightly above the national average. All the studies came to the same conclusion—that raising the minimum wage had no effect on employment.

MacIver then stoops lower by dredging up the words "entitlement" and "dependent," two anger points low information conservatives froth at the mouth over.

This plan would force more Wisconsinites into unemployment, which would lead them to be more dependent on government entitlement programs.”

The MacIver Institute released the following report previously that shows 7,109 fewer teenagers are working in Wisconsin today due to increases in minimum wage since 2005.

And in that report it made the same apple to oranges comparison. So if you repeat a report long enough, it becomes...true? Again, there is no relationship between the minimum wage and unemployment rate, unless businesses themselves haven't change at all over the last 40 years. Well, have they changed or not?

I think they would be happy doing away with the minimum wage, ya think?