One of Americans' favorite pastimes is complaining about how little their jobs pays, or that their job doesn't pay enough for what they have to do. And politicians are more than willing to take advantage of this. The solution many politicians have, which is of course, popular with those of us that have to work for a living, is to force companies to pay their employees more. Does anyone else see a problem with this idea?

This approach may sound good, make workers happy, and it may give those politicians who support the idea the warm fuzzy feelings that come with their name being dropped into a ballot box, but this approach does not work!

Before supporting such a measure ask yourself these three little questions: Where will the money to increase my pay come from? Why does the government care how much money I make? Why do the politicians selling this idea care how much money I make? None of the answers support increasing the mininum wage. If we are going to increase to mininum wage one cent we might as well increase it to a thousand dollars an hour.

We would like to think that our fine place of employment would cut spending, reduce waste, and that the upper management would take a pay cut to increase the wages of their employees. But its just not true. If forced to increase the wages of their employees companies will make up for the extra cost by increasing their prices, passing the cost on to consumers. Effectively, the employees would be paying for their own pay increase through the prices they pay at the grocery store. Not only that, it is very possible that the same companies will hire less employees, cut benefits, and even reduce the number of employees that currently have on staff, hurting the job market.

Why should the government care how much money we make? For better or worse we have a progressive tax system that taxes people who make more money heavier than those who make less. It is quite possible a large chunk of your nice pay increase will go directly to Uncle Sam.

Why do politicians support a mininum wage increase? Best case scenerio, they do it because they honestly care about workers, and are trying to help them. Worse case scenerio they are buying votes and would like to increase the amount of tax revenue the govenment takes in. Keep in mind we are talking about politicians, and either way increasing the mininum wage is bad policy. Let's let supply and demand do its thing.