By Brandi Makuski

Portage County has a new political crusade in the form of a call for raising the minimum wage. Advocates of the increase- which now are set to the recommended $10.10 per hour- say the spike will raise the poor from the depths of poverty, and it’s a neat trick.

Nobody wants to be caught without compassion for the poor, working poor, or flat-out unemployed. Katrina Shankland, Tom Mallison and other local officials say the minimum wage is overdue for a facelift- and they certainly have a point. After all, minimum wage doesn’t rise along with inflation, so that gallon of milk which used to cost $2.09 but now costs almost $3.00 means you’re going to take a $0.91 hit somewhere in your already-tight budget.

I get the argument. I truly do: I’ve been a divorced single mother for over ten years, and if you’re not familiar with the costs associated with actually feeding two teenaged boys, I’m here to tell you it’s painful on my pocketbook. Not to mention their ever-growing limbs which requires constant stream of new jeans, new shoes and new everything else simply because it doesn’t fit. Of course, that doesn’t include school fees, sports gear, field trips or medical bills.

But have the advocates of a minimum wage increase actually done their research? Just because voters may want a rise in the minimum wage, does that automatically make it a good idea? After all, I want free Belt’s ice cream on Saturdays, and I’m willing to be everyone else would love that, too. But it makes no fiscal sense, and it goes against everything our capitalist nation was built on.

One of the most basic economic principles is this: people tend to buy more when the price is lower; less when the price is higher. Yet advocates of a minimum wage increase seem to think that the government can raise the price of labor without reducing the amount of labor that will be hired. We also need to consider how our definition of “poor” has changed over the years. I grew up waiting in lines for what my mother called “government cheese”: a brick of some kind of cheese- type material, colored and sliced to look like cheese, but it was pretty good on a sandwich.

But we were poor in every sense of the word most of the time while I was growing up. Free cheese- even processed cheese- was as good as it got for us. We had no air conditioning and no dryer- our clothes were hung on the line well into my teenage years. We didn’t have a computer or cell phones, either: never mind that they weren’t widely available- they were a luxury we could not afford. But somehow, mom scraped together enough money each year, using a combination of K-Mart layaway and pinching pennies, to get all three of us new school clothes and supplies each year.

You couldn’t put cheese on layaway; and notebooks and folders, purchased throughout the year and wisely, cost less than $0.10 a piece at that time. Even today you can purchase school folders, pencils and pens for under $0.50 each. They aren’t the prettiest, but they do the job.

I’m not against a rise in minimum wage; I’m against our current definition of “poor”. Even if minimum wage jobs are intended as “starter positions” for young adults, I believe there are circumstances whereby a qualified individual simply can’t find a better-paying job. But by and large, minimum wage is intended as a starting point; a place from where you rise through the ranks and earn your way up through hard work. It doesn’t come overnight and it doesn’t come easy.

The proposed raise to over $10 a hour, though, will create a wider division in the current income gap. Consider those thousands of Portage County residents who started at $7.25 and busted their butts to that golden number of $10 an hour- imagine how morale will plummet among those workers when they begin to see teenagers and entry- level workers starting out at such a wage.

Imagine how many employers will have to lay off staff, raise the prices of their own products, reduce their services, or close down altogether.

I’m not saying these are definite outcomes of a $10.10 minimum wage. But we certainly haven’t considered all the outcomes of such a drastic rise in employer costs, and we definitely aren’t thinking about the small business owner- the outright backbone of the entire community.