"Honest Graft": The REAL math of raising the minimum wage

Is the government raising the minimum wage a good thing?  It all depends, but make no mistake, goodness has nothing to do with it. Noah Rothman in Commentary:

In February of 2014, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office released a study that found raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour by 2016 would hike earnings marginally for up to 16.5 million workers, but that would come at a cost. Approximately 500,000 lower-skilled workers would lose their jobs, and “the income of most workers who became jobless would fall substantially.” In early 2014, with the official unemployment rate stable at 6.7 percent, that did not seem to many like a tradeoff worth making.

Nonsense, the left declared...

Add in the moral vanity in feeling you're lifting the unfortunate--not to mention the unalloyed delight of sticking it to The Man--and as George Washington Plunkitt of the most ingeniously corrupt political machine in American history, New York's Tammany Hall, summed it up, it's

Another kind of honest graft. Tammany has raised a good many salaries. There was an awful howl by the reformers, but don’t you know that Tammany gains ten votes for every one it lost by salary raisin'?

The Wall Street banker thinks it shameful to raise a department clerk’s salary from $1500 to $1800 a year, but every man who draws a salary himself says: “That’s all right. I wish it was me.” And he feels very much like votin' the Tammany ticket on election day, just out of sympathy."

For every person you screw, dozens more get the goodies, and that translates to votes, baby, votes. The math of buying votes--with other people's money!--is a political elegance for the ages, worked every time it's tried.