Did you know you need a quarter to put air in your tires?

Or, the high cost of inflation

I've blown the budget on budget blogs for this week, but let me address one point out of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty's final (I hope), NDP-ish budget: the raising of the minimum wage in Ontario to $10.25/hr (in three years). I had a wee change of brain on this one a couple of weeks ago, as a result of something I read in the Toronto Star.

Digression: the price of prejudice is constant mantenance, the checking of your cherished truisms against invading facts. Whenever one of mine gets overturned, I feel momentarily naked and unsure of myself. I'm like a baby who's had his security blankie snatched away. Far from feeling liberated, I actually feel a tad threatened. I've betrayed myself: there will be reprisals, yes? Never mind the good reasons, they aren't that good at all, you're thinking like them, stop that!
Thus do prejudices re-assert and perpetuate themselves.

I used to side with practically every economist in the world in saying that raising the minimum wage is reckless, irresponsible, and just plain wrongheaded. The general consensus seems to be that employers will simply refuse to pay people a decent living wage, even if mandated by law, and will eliminate jobs wherever possible. So government would be hurting the people it's trying to help.
There may be some validity to this argument. All you have to do is think back to the dawn of office computerization. Remember all those naive fools who predicted a four day work week and undreamed amounts of leisure time? Yeah, like that happened, right? Instead, companies quickly figured out how to do more with less, eliminating jobs galore. Hey, the thinking went. If right now we're forcing one guy to do the work of two, and a computer can do the work of ten, well, then, now one guy can do the work of twenty. Or something like that. There is no God but Greed, and Dollar is His Profit.
What's to say that companies, mandated by law to pay their employees a reasonable minimum wage, won't find new and brilliantly creative ways to beat the system? And never mind that "enlightened self-interest" crap.
The answer is simple, really: they need their minimum wage workers. More often than not, they are the face of your company, the front line to your bottom line, as it were. You can't eliminate your grocery cashier, your burger flipper, or your telemarketer (although wouldn't that be nice?)
Almost seventy percent of those earning minimum wage work for companies with more than 500 employees. Surely they can afford to dole out a little of their CEOs' obscene salary packages to the people who really drive their business?
Sorry, thinking like a socialist, there. No, wait a second. Never mind the minimum wage: I wish somebody would enact a maximum wage. Make it, say, ten times the minimum. Nice metric figures. You could call it a remuneration rating, or RR for short. If the minimum wage is $10.25 an hour--call it RR 1--then the maximum would be $102.50 an hour...RR 10. If there's anybody out there reading this blog who currently makes more than $102.50 an hour, I would please invite you to (a) justify your wage and (b) explain why you require more than that to live your life.

There. Socialist to outright communist in one paragraph. And they call me a Conservative. Ha. But all that money above and beyond $102.50/hr that lots of people make, but I contend nobody really needs--can you imagine the positive impact that would have, loosed upon the world?

What really got me in line with the idea of a minimum wage increase was a single sentence in one Toronto Star column. (I wish I could attribute it better than that: I feel a sense of gratitude for having been Shown The Light.) The Light read thusly:

If, in 1972, the minimum wage had been tied to inflation, today it would be $10.25/hr.

I actually felt the impact of that sentence in my head. It reverberated around my skull: rrrrrrrrrippppppp! as my blankie was torn away.

I've never felt it at all fair that your buying power could stagnate and decline as a result of economic factors completely out of your control. Life's not fair, goes the parental voice in my head, but come on, that's just barbarous. It's possible for your salary to have doubled or even tripled over your career, while your take home pay remains the same or even falls, in terms of what it can buy. This is acceptable? I think not.

As far as I'm concerned, ALL wages, including welfare rates, should be fully indexed to inflation. Companies can't even say they'd be losing money, since the buying power of their profits is also tied to inflation. I'll admit I'm nobody's economist, but doesn't this make sense?