Congress against the employed (especially teens).

The economics lesson continues via the Wall Street Journal:

Here’s some economic logic to ponder. The unemployment rate in June for American teenagers was 24%, for black teens it was 38%, and even White House economists are predicting more job losses. So how about raising the cost of that teenage labor?

Sorry to say, but that’s precisely what will happen on July 24, when the minimum wage will increase to $7.25 an hour from $6.55. The national wage floor will have increased 41% since the three-step hike was approved by the Democratic Congress in May 2007. Then the economy was humming, with an overall jobless rate of 4.5% and many entry-level jobs paying more than the minimum. That’s a hard case to make now, with a 9.5% national jobless rate and thousands of employers facing razor-thin profit margins.

It’s not rocket science folks. You have two minimum-wage employees, Congress raises minimum wage, you can’t afford both. And so on.

It reminds me of a letter written to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to his New Deal policies. This is from The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shales:

A woman from Connersville, Indiana, wrote to President Roosevelt:

I have been employed as a clerk at E.J. Schlichte Company this city for seven years five months until the NRA [National Recovery Act] went into effect. They let me out said they coulden’ pay me $14 a week. When the NRA went into effect [creating minimum wage], I was so happy I had planned to lay in some coal and pay on some bills I owe, I guess I was too happy.

Indeed. To underscore that point, after the 1929 stock market crash unemployment went from 3 percent to about 9 percent. By 1931, unemployment was 17.4 percent, with big thanks to Hoover’s Hawley-Smoot tariff. By October 1933, well into FDR’s first year, it hit 22 percent. Five years after that (1938), five years of New Deal, it was virtually stagnant — 17.4 percent. By 1940, the year before the Second World War would finally end the Great Depression, and after 7 years of New Deal “experiment,” as FDR termed it, unemployment was still a whopping 14.6 percent.