Replace "Krugman" with "liberals" and it just about covers it. It is much worse than this picture -- liberals are consistently inconsistent because they believe that they can take all sorts of actions in the real world and somehow pick and choose the results -- often claiming they will achieve the exact opposite result of what their actions are guaranteed to achieve in the real world. Or, they know what they are doing and simply want to create a dependent voter population that will keep them in power.
Thus, on one hand they claim that the ONLY effect of raising the minimum wage will be to help minimum wage workers by giving them more per hour. However, when the price of something is raised (labor), the demand for it WILL go down -- the only question is how much, which economists attempt to answer by "elasticity". Demand for cigarettes was often used as an example when I was taking economics, however there isn't anything that is perfectly inelastic -- it would have to have no substitutes and all consumers would have to have infinite wealth relative to the price of the commodity -- ie. be ABLE to pay whatever the price rose to.
But I digress. The fast food market is quite elastic and there are lots of substitutes -- technology being the obvious one, less people eating more expensive fast food, etc. Raising the minimum wage always reduces the number of people working -- a win-win for Democrats, since both the minimum wage workers and the unemployed tend to vote Democrat. BUT, the fiction given to the public is that raising the minimum wage will not cause more unemployment, when it is a given that it will.
Which as the chart points out, might mean that people that don't understand economics are fooled -- but the flip side means that can't be true. Cap and trade argues that "supply and demand works!" -- that by raising the price of using carbon, the demand for carbon will fall.
So if liberals were reality based, they would say that they are fine with the economy being vastly slowed by taxes and fees on carbon, because they care about warming in 100 years more than they do about jobs, income, etc today.
On the raising the minimum wage they would admit they are fine with a LOT less people having jobs as long as a few can have higher wages.. Or they would admit that they are absolutely fine with the lowering of productivity and national wealth via high taxes on corporate and personal income, because having everyone's standard of living being generally lowered by redistributing income so they are more government dependent is perfectly in line with their strategy to be a one party socialist state!
The left is well on it's way to achieving it's goals -- inconsistency and force are the two cornerstones of leftward thought.
'via Blog this'
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