"The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high"
About this Quote
A provocation dressed up as economic inevitability, Laffer’s line is engineered to force a moral recoil: if you support the minimum wage, are you quietly endorsing black teen unemployment? The move is classic supply-and-demand storytelling, but also classic political rhetoric. By renaming the policy as “the black teenage unemployment act,” he smuggles a contested empirical claim into a title that sounds like legislation, collapsing debate into a gut punch.
The intent is twofold. First, it reframes minimum wage laws from worker protection to gatekeeping. “Price their original services too high” casts low-skill labor as an entry-level product, and the economy as a marketplace that punishes compassion with exclusion. Second, it recruits civil-rights language to argue for deregulation: the “poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised” become the human shield for a broader critique of wage floors. The subtext is that well-meaning elites (or unions, or progressive lawmakers) are the real architects of inequality because they “price out” the very people they claim to defend.
Context matters. Laffer rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s as a signature voice of supply-side economics, when inflation, deindustrialization, and urban job loss made youth unemployment (especially among Black teens) a politically potent statistic. This quote sits inside that era’s rhetorical battlefield: not just arguing about economic effects, but fighting over who gets to claim the mantle of fairness.
What makes it work is its asymmetry. It doesn’t need to prove the minimum wage causes unemployment in this group; it needs only to insinuate that the risk is morally intolerable. It’s persuasion by indictment, not by footnote.
The intent is twofold. First, it reframes minimum wage laws from worker protection to gatekeeping. “Price their original services too high” casts low-skill labor as an entry-level product, and the economy as a marketplace that punishes compassion with exclusion. Second, it recruits civil-rights language to argue for deregulation: the “poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised” become the human shield for a broader critique of wage floors. The subtext is that well-meaning elites (or unions, or progressive lawmakers) are the real architects of inequality because they “price out” the very people they claim to defend.
Context matters. Laffer rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s as a signature voice of supply-side economics, when inflation, deindustrialization, and urban job loss made youth unemployment (especially among Black teens) a politically potent statistic. This quote sits inside that era’s rhetorical battlefield: not just arguing about economic effects, but fighting over who gets to claim the mantle of fairness.
What makes it work is its asymmetry. It doesn’t need to prove the minimum wage causes unemployment in this group; it needs only to insinuate that the risk is morally intolerable. It’s persuasion by indictment, not by footnote.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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