Sunday, January 3, 2016

Raimondo Applauds Minimum Wage Hike

Gina Raimondo 

Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo says the recent increase in the minimum wage will help thousands of Rhode Island residents, but the state can do more to help lift people out of poverty.

The state’s minimum wage increased by 60 cents per hour on Januar 1, to $9.60.

But, she says, raising the minimum wage alone is not enough.

She says in 2016, the state must train people with skills for high-wage jobs and create more jobs to boost incomes.

This lady obviously has no clue how markets work and the damage that the minimum wage does for the employment prospects of the least productive.

Should we blame Harvard Professor Greg Mankiw for her interventionist, economically illiterate views?  He has been a professor of economics at Harvard since 1987 to the present.

Raimondo graduated with a B.A. magna cum laude in, get this, Economics from Harvard in 1993.

Mankiw was chairman of the economics department and teaches the introductory economic course, EC10 (It is not clear if he taught the course in the early 1990s).

Regardless, whether blame should be put directly on Mankiw, the Harvard econ department has surely failed here.

I consider the grades and understanding that a student gets out of a course a reflection of  the quality of teaching. Understanding how free markets work and why the minimum wage is evil is not a difficult concept to get across.

Harvard has failed here.

 -RW

3 comments:

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    1. Yup, that's why I needed to scroll. I thought he was going to say Justin...

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  2. Having owned property in R.I.for 25 years and in Connecticut for 27, I can attest to the fact that these two states have some of the most clueless public officials in the U.S. The state legislatures are always heavily Democratic and the governors either dumb or criminal, often both. Both states have wealthy citizens (CT has Fairfield Ct. and Greenich; Rhody has Newport) but the vast bulk of the population is middle or lower class in income. Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport have some of the worst poverty in the country. Ditto for most of Rhody where hard-working families battle sky-high property taxes and state income taxes. To retire in either state is insane. When we lost the income tax battle in Ct. I sold everything and came to Florida. It has only gotten worse since.

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