critique-The Young and the Jobless- The Wall Street Journal

The Young and the Jobless
The author’s claim is that raising minimum wage is preventing teenagers from finding jobs. The author presents a great number of statistics mostly from the findings of economists David Neumark and William Wascher as support for his claim. According to the article since Congress began raising minimum wage in July 2007 there are now 691,000 fewer teenagers working. I can understand his side of the story. If a company is being forced to pay a worker a higher hourly wage than why would they choose to hire an unskilled worker than a skilled worker. Teens do not have much working experience so the decrease in working teens makes sense. The author argues that the white house and the Obama administration are doing nothing to solve this problem, they are clearly ignoring it since they have recently raised minimum wage this past August. The author proposes that Congress create a teenage wage of $4 to $5 an hour to make employers more likely to hire teens. This idea has been previously endorsed by chief economic advisor Larry Summers. Although I can see the author’s credibility and I agree that the solution may be necessary to keep teenagers employed in today’s bad economy, I do not see this as a long term solution. I don’t believe that teenagers should be paid less for doing the same amount of work. I am also a strong proponent of raising the minimum wage. Most of the jobs that pay minimum wage are customer service jobs and having been employed in that industry I can say that people put in more time and effort than what they are paid for. Teenagers are generally paid less than adult workers anyway so why lower teenage wages anymore. Considering that the target audience is teens, I think the author should take in to account what teenagers would propose as a solution to teenage unemployment.