YOU THOUGHT THAT the minimum-wage question on the ballot last
year was just something to kick the minimum wage in Nevada up
a dollar?
Many folks
did. But a lot more was at stake than the news media let on.
Now that same
proposal—with all its many built-in booby traps—has already
passed the Nevada Assembly and received its first reading in
the Senate.
If the
Nevada business community does not weigh in quickly, and
massively, the Silver State’s business climate will never be
the same.
That’s
because:
§ What’s
called the “dollar increase” actually means a dollar increase
over the federal minimum wage. And while the AFL-CIO is
leading the charge here in Nevada, it’s doing the same in
Washington D.C. There, it’s pushing for legislation to
increase the federal minimum to $7.25—which means the tab
to Nevada business owners could easily be $8.25 per hour!
-
The proposal
on the ballot last fall—and now embodied in AB 87—also
requires that Nevada’s minimum wage be indexed to rise as
much as 3 percent each year with the federal Consumer
Price Index, as published each year by the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics. Thus the Nevada minimum wage will
automatically rise each year by another
amount, regardless of the state of the economy, or
employment levels, or changes in competing states.
-
Washington
State was victimized in 1999 by a similar minimum wage
law—cited approvingly by AFL-CIO representatives before the
Nevada Assembly—and today the Washington minimum wage
is more than 36 percent higher than the national average!
Worse, powerful evidence found by respected national
economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Galloway, indicates
that the Washington poverty rate almost immediately expanded
by more than 20 percent!
