Incentivizing People to Stay Home?

By ESB Professional @shutterstock

Mike Rowe, former “Dirty Jobs” star and executive producer of “Six Degrees with Mike Rowe,” has some thoughts on the debate in Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour.

I want everybody to be able to support themselves. But if you just pull the money out of midair you’re going to create other problems, like there is a ladder of success that people climb and some of those jobs that are out there for seven, eight, nine dollars an hour, in my view, they’re simply not intended to be careers. They’re not intended to be full-time jobs. They’re rungs on a ladder.

Policy and policy debates need to focus on the reality of economics and its unintended consequences, such as incentivizing people to stay home, writes Margot Cleveland in The Federalist.

As Mike Rowe points out, minimum-wage jobs are rungs – preparation for the next higher rung. Rather than the government offering artificially high wages for unskilled jobs, Rowe would “encourage more people to learn a skill that is actually in demand.”