WLS at Patterico's Pontifications has a different take on the jump in unemployment.
The reason unemployment jumped from 5.1% to 5.5% wasn't that lots of 35-year-old professionals lost their jobs. It's that far more 16-24-year-olds entered the job market. We used to call these "summer jobs" before liberals started trying to convince us all that mothers were feeding families of four on Six Flags Over Texas wages.
The interesting part of WLS's post came when he discussed how raising the minimum wage should be tied in to the bump in unemployment.
My parents own an ice cream shop, and rely heavily in its operation on eight 16-20 year olds working part-time schedules of 16-24 hours a week, along with one full-time manager who is assisted by my parents in their free time. Over the course of a 7 day work week, they typically employ the part-time workers for a total of about 340 hours a week.
Raising the minimum wage by .70 increased their straight wage expense by $240 a week, or about $1000 a month. But it had collateral consequences as well, as their worker’s comp. and unemployment insurance costs rose in relation to their payroll, as did their payroll tax contributions. The combination of wage increase and the various increases that spin off that wage increase was about $1500 a month. This is against a total wage expense for the part-timers of about $8000 a month.
Now, the ice cream parlor business is somewhat inelastic from a price stand point — people won’t continue to pay higher and higher prices for an ice cream cone when the alternative is simply to do without. So, that increase in operating expense could not, in total, be passed on to the customers. Instead, my parents worked a few more hours themselves and trimmed back on the hours they had the part-timers working. When one of the part-timers quit, they didn’t hire a replacement for her.
As conservatives will tell you, raises in the minimum wage aren't merely absorbed by greedy business owners. Those costs get passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices and/or cuts in employee hours (or actual employment).
The idea that the minimum wage should allow a person to support a family creates the sort of unrealistic expectations we see in the above illustration.
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