Mary Lazich: 0 for 2

There are a number of ridiculous aspects to Mary Lazich's latest absurd attempt to justify her vote against the state's minimum wage increase -- the first of which is her hysterical attempt at historionics when she declares:

[I]f lawmakers during 1919 had been able to see the path they were starting with their 22-cent minimum wage, they likely would not have done it.

I take that to mean she doesn't believe in any minimum wage, which would have been a more honest argument to make than the brief history of Wisconsin minimum wage increases as a function of of their relationship to inflation.

Now, if Lazich still wants to play herself off as a historian of economics, then why doesn't she calculate the lost wages that would have been earned by workers earning the minimum wage had it been indexed for inflation between 1919 and 1956 (or between any of the other periods of time between hikes). Let's see if employers are the only one's getting screwed by the way the minimum wage is currently managed.

And while we're still talking about inflation let's just point out that Lazich whole argument about the trend to increase the minimum wage beyond "what inflation calls for" becomes null and void by the very nature of the bill, which would adjust the minimum wage according to inflation in the future.

But all this inflation talk is a very sterile way of addressing a problem that Lazich hasn't considered. What Lazich clearly fails to understand is that inflation isn't the only factor that makes life more expensive over time. So instead of juggling all of the percentages that Lazich throws out at her readers, here are a couple of numbers to consider:

$15,808

That's the annual salary of someone making the proposed minimum wage ($7.60/hour) who works 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year. Here's another number:

$16,689

That's the poverty line for a family of three (including one child under the age of 18), or at least that was where the poverty line was at in 2007.

What I find astonishing is Lazich's insistance on using her own sorry arguments for justifying her vote on this piece of legislation. Betwen this sorry business and her idiotic "save the camps!" garbage, Lazich's office seems hellbent on making her look even more foolish than most people already regard her. Why don't they just save themselves the trouble and just spit back the talking points that WMC hands out?

[via James Rowen]