Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Amanda Terkel — Dave Brat, Economics Professor: 'I Don't Have A Well-Crafted Response' On Minimum Wage


This guy is an economics professor involved in politics and doesn’t have a "well-crafted response" to a question about the minimum wage? Fail.

TODD: Should there be a minimum wage in your opinion?

BRAT: I don't have a well-crafted response on that one. All I know is if you take the long-run graph over 200 years of the wage rate, it cannot differ from your nation's productivity. Right? So you can't make up wage rates. Right? I would love for everyone in sub-Saharan Africa, for example -- children of God -- to make $100 an hour. I would love to just assert that that would be the case. But you can't assert that unless you raise their productivity, and then the wage follows.
According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the federal minimum wage in the United States should actually be almost $22 an hour if it had kept up with increases in worker productivity.
The Huffington Post
Dave Brat, Economics Professor: 'I Don't Have A Well-Crafted Response' On Minimum Wage
Amanda Terkel

4 comments:

Ryan Harris said...

Got to admire his honesty, It needs to be crafted in a focus group before he can take a position. Ugh.

Anonymous said...

BRAT: "All I know is if you take the long-run graph over 200 years of the wage rate, it cannot differ from your nation's productivity. Right?"

Would it were so.

Does this fellow get out? He wrote a book criticizing fellow economists. I guess he did not criticize them for not being empirical enough.

mike norman said...

His economic policy is "fiscal conservatism" and "faith in God." That's apparently what he teaches over there at Faith Uni.

Tom Hickey said...

I guess he is checking with God on his policy response to make sure he has it right.