The Obama Administration's Good News-Bad News Plan...

Excerpts from today's WND article, Obama's Next Targets: Walmart & Best Buy?(with my added emphasis):

"A far-left think tank founded with input from President Obama is pushing a plan for private retail stores such as Walmart to create a “new wage floor” that hikes workers’ wages by at least 27 percent to $12.25 per hour."

"The scheme is outlined in a new study published by Demos, a longtime partner of the disgraced ACORN activist group."

"According to Demos’ own website, while Obama was a state senator in 1999, he served on the working group that founded Demos."

"Last month, Demos released a 15-page research paper titled “Retail’s Hidden Potential: How Raising Wages Would Benefit Workers, the Industry and the Overall Economy.” "

"The study provides a chart listing the country’s biggest retailers, including Walmart, Target, Kroger, Home Depot, Walgreens, Lowe’s, Best Buy, Safeway and Macy’s.
The plan urges the enactment of a “new wage floor” for the lowest-paid private retail workers equivalent to $25,000 per year – or $12.25 per hour – for a full-time, year-round retail worker at the nation’s largest retail companies, identified as those employing at least 1,000 workers.
The think tank posits the pay hike would create 100,000 or more new jobs, thus stimulating the economy. It surmises the pay increase would cost consumers “just cents more per shopping trip on average.”The study, however, does not mention that the template for the “new wage floor” is a failed Demos plan urging a “living wage.”

Now let's look at this seemingly "altruistic", but highly impractical scheme, from a more practical standpoint.

1. This plan has been tried before in the 1990s, and was an abysmal failure for the businesses involved.
2. Does nobody in the Obama administration understand that the cost of living is directly tied to the minimum wage? The retailers are not going to "take one for the team"! As their operating expenses go up (such as the mandatory Obamacare costs, and this harebrained scheme), they will pass those costs along to the consumer!
3. The plan (as explained today) would apply to "full-time, year-round retail workers". And who would be surprised when Walmart, Target, Kroger, Home Depot, Walgreens, Lowe’s, Best Buy, Safeway and Macy’s suddenly has upper-level management (who are already making more than the proposed minimum wage) as their only "full-time, year-round workers"? The floor personnel, shipping and receiving, stockers, etc., would be immediately converted - and employed as - "part-time, seasonal workers" in order to obviate that unnecessary payroll expense.
4. The "100,000 or more new jobs" they claim it would create would be 100,000 new part-time, seasonal jobs to take up the slack created by these retail giants converting their original staff to part-time, seasonal! 
5. Every product and service we pay for would be increased by approximately the same percentage as the minimum wage hike. A can of Pork & Beans that was $1.69 the day before, is now $2.15, and that's not counting any increase for Obamacare. And that increase would be seen in every item we buy, or service we use!

Such a plan is nothing more than another dangerous psychological "warm & fuzzy" for those earning minimum wage. Any benefit they might see from an "increase" would be immediately offset by the increase in their cost of living, and (and this is most-likely the real driving force behind the wage "increase") moving them into a higher tax bracket! The more they make, the bigger cut the government gets!

This is just one more example of the liberal left's "Voodoo Economics", and "Smoke and mirrors" math, guiding us blithely down the path toward the fiscal cliff. We pay more, while Congress and the Obama Administration steals more from us... all the while disguising that theft as a "wage hike" for those on the bottom rung of the earnings ladder.

Details of the above referenced article may be found at: 
http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/obamas-next-targets-walmart-best-buy/