At City Journal Charles Fain Lehman worries that a $15/hour federal minimum wage will have the unforeseen consequence of a major youth crime wave:
A surprising body of research links increases in the minimum wage to increases in criminal offending by those most likely to lose jobs as a result of the wage hike. One analysis concluded that raising the federal minimum to $15 could create crime costs of up to $2.5 billion—a bill that would be borne disproportionately by the very people whom the wage hike is meant to help.
There are other developments that should be considered:
no schoolremote learning- not arresting people let alone prosecuting people for committing petty crimes has become a matter of policy in some places
- cutting police budgets
- electing states attorneys who don’t believe in enforcing the law (certainly the case here in Cook County)
- general boredom and agitation due to the COVID-19 pandemic
Are we creating a perfect storm?
Footnote:
Here in Chicago the rates of homicides, shooting, carjackings, and violent crime generally are running well ahead of last year which ran well ahead of 2019 while arrest rates have fallen. Many of the perpetrators of these crimes are believed to be juveniles.
Who “we” Kemosabe? Those are all, overwhelmingly, Democrat Party positions.
Couple of days ago a couple passing through town were killed in a shootout with police. Crime stops here.
Guess you didn’t hear about it because of their race.
https://www.kfornow.com/breaking-second-suspect-in-north-lincoln-shootout-has-died/
Must be that white fragility I’ve heard about.
Peter Turchin, in the Atlantic, (12/20) says we are.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2020/12/
“To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,†he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.â€) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,†civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.
The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions.”