I’d like my taxes done, is there someone else I can talk to?

 I did my taxes online last week. It only took a couple of hours and it was free. I think Liberty Tax Service knows about this.

“Do you like attention? Let us TRAIN you to wave! We want the best wavers and holding weekly auditions to ensure only the best represent us.”

That’s a Craigslist ad in Seattle. Liberty’s Milwaukee ad euphemistically calls for “Marketer Positions”. How many MBA’s will show up for that interview? Or rather, audition.

 Anyway, now that I know Liberty Tax Service puts the best wavers on the corner, I want to see their best accountants. I saw someone at a bus stop dancing and wearing what might have been a plush green Statue of Liberty cape. They may or may not have worked for Liberty Tax Service.

Last week I was taught in class that a minimum wage is bad for an economy. And there is economic logic there: raising the lowest wages above their natural market price for low skill jobs will increase demand for those jobs, decrease funds available to hire other workers, and increase unemployment.

There are, of course, benefits to letting people, particularly poor people, have more money. Because when you give it to them it doesn’t just go away. They spend it. And as Paul Krugman notes about wages, “where there have been more or less controlled experiments, for example when New Jersey raised minimum wages but Pennsylvania did not, the effects of the increase on employment have been negligible or even positive.” The centrist conclusion, he says, is that minimum wages “reduce employment, but that the effects are small and swamped by other forces.”

Alternatives exist for helping low wage workers without disrupting market forces at all. The Earned Income Tax Credit can give families over $5,000 as part of their tax refund or throughout the year. That amounts to a $2.40 hourly raise for a full time worker. So the EIC is nice, but increasing it is harder to do politically than increasing the minimum wage because, as Krugman puts it, minimum wage increases are done “off-budget”.

I guess my point is that with 8.4% unemployment in Milwaukee it’s good that people are able to find work dressed as the Statue of Liberty, for pay likely made higher by our minimum wage, but not high enough that anyone is changing careers for it. And all that also goes for whatever mascot starts to stand outside of Blockbuster when they realize I can watch everything online.