There are some liberal websites online that I just simply never visit because they are nothing but mouthpieces for the complete and utter socialist agenda. I regularly visit Obama's campaign, the White House website and the sites of liberal members of Congress just to see what the enemy is up to, but there are some that are better left alone so they don't infect your mind. Think Progress is one, and you will soon learn why I normally never visit it.
Most people that know anything about economics (unlike our President) know what a dead end it is to raise the minimum wage. The minimum wage was never intended to be a career level job and it was never intended to support a family. It was intended to be a minimum wage for first time job seekers or low skill level jobs. Most minimum wage jobs today are at local fast food restaurants, grocery stores, mom and pop stores, etc., and it just stands to reason that if you raise the minimum wage, you must either raise the price of a hamburger you get for $2.50 or groceries or you demand less workers do more work so you aren't charging the customer more for their Happy Meal or their bag of food for the week.
Not only does President Obama wrongly propose raising the minimum wage will, “raise the incomes of millions of working familiesâ€, the liberal website and "Think Tank" (if you must call it that) Think Progress suggests in a recent article that raising the minimum wage will also reduce gun violence in Chicago. No kidding, we're not making this up. To bolster support for Obama's push to raise the minimum wage, and make fast food and groceries more expensive for all of us, Think Progress is claiming gun crime will go down in Chicago when the minimum wage goes up.
They state:
It may be possible to help reduce gun violence in Chicago — a city that saw over 500 homicides last year — in one simple step: Raising the minimum wage.
A new report released by the group Stand Up! Chicago draws a clear connection between violent crime and low wages and economic inequality in the Windy City, and while raising wages alone can’t eliminate the gun violence that haunts the city’s streets, it could certainly help, the group asserts.
In Stand Up's report subtitled, The Case For Raising Wages to Save Lives, they claim,
Decades of research have demonstrated that there is a statistically significant link between low wages, income inequality and crime. Researchers have found that the majority of increases in violent crime can be explained by downward wage trends, and The National Bureau of Economic Research reports that a twenty percent drop in wages leads to a 12 to 18 percent increase in youth crime.
While there may be a link between low wages and crime, that it not the cause. Just because there is a correlation, it doesn't mean that low wages is the driver of the crime. Attitudes, self respect, respect of others, manners, fatherless homes, one parent homes, gang violence, drugs, selfishness, greed and many, many other factors contribute to the onslaught of crime and gun violence in cities like Chicago.
If you follow the logic of the article on ThinkProgress.com (sorry, I refuse to link to such stupidity, but you can see the screen capture above) to its conclusion, something liberals almost always fail to do, then if we raised the minimum wage to $20 or $30 an hour, it would eliminate all crime and all poverty. But wait, some group would still have to be the lowest paid workers, so I guess they would become the new criminals looking to do evil.
This is the mindless foolishness that was responsible for electing Barack Obama a second time. Aren't you looking forward to the next 4 years?