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The Truth about the Minimum Wage

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Scripted, animated, and produced by Steve Patterson. Special thanks to Julia Patterson and Chuck Grimmett.Want to learn more? Here are some resources about the economics of the minimum wage: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-truth-about-the-minimum-wage#axzz2KkJGtC1XPeople don't like to think that anyone's labor is worth less than the minimum wage. Someone might end up flipping burgers for $5.00 an hour. You might think the minimum wage is a way of paying some sort of dignity premium -- hence language like "living wage." People with such good intentions look at the direct beneficiaries of these policies, say, burger flippers now making $7.50 an hour. They pat themselves on the back. But they rarely count the invisible costs: willing human beings who never get hired in the first place.But $5.00 an hour is not enough to live on!, they'll say. For whom? A teenager living at home with his parents? An elderly person who wants simply to stay active? A single mom with three kids? A single woman sharing an apartment with 2 roommates? Of course, not all of these people could live off of $5 an hour. But some of them could given the opportunity. Concerns about those who couldn't don't justify minimum wages even if we ignored the invisible costs of the policy, which include reduced margins to businesses that might otherwise grow (and hire more people).In other words, if you pull take off the bottom two rungs of the income ladder, many will never climb it. That's the effect of the minimum wage.

FBI Director: I Have to Check to See If Obama H…

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FBI Director Robert Mueller on Wednesday said he would have to go back and check with the Department of Justice whether Attorney General Eric Holder's "three criteria" for the targeted killing of Americans also applied to Americans inside the U.S.Pressed by House lawmakers about a recent speech in which Holder described the legal justification for assassination, Mueller, who was attending a hearing on his agency's budget, did not say without qualification that the three criteria could not be applied inside the U.S."I have to go back. Uh, I'm not certain whether that was addressed or not," Mueller said when asked by Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ga., about a distinction between domestic and foreign targeting. Graves followed up asking whether "from a historical perspective," the federal government has "the ability to kill a U.S. citizen on United States soil or just overseas.""I'm going to defer that to others in the Department of Justice," Mueller replied.Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/07/mueller-have-to-check-with-holder-whether-targeted-killing-rule-is-outside-us/#ixzz2IzbrBnoGFBI -- WARNING -- Federal law allows citizens to reproduce, distribute or exhibit portions of copyright motion pictures, video tapes, or video disks under certain circumstances without authorization of the copyright holder. This infringement of copyright is called fair use and is allowed for purposes of criticism, news reporting, teaching and parody.