A PUSH ON WAGES

You may have hoped that sufficient progress had been made to banish economic illiteracy from these parts. If so, you would have been wrong.

If a left-wing advocacy group has its way, Missouri's minimum wage will rise next year, to $6.25 from the current $4.25, or a whopping overnight increase of 47 percent. The group, which is in the field with a petition seeking to qualify an initiative for the November ballot, calls itself ACORN, which stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Were it to pass, Missouri would have by far the highest minimum wage of any state in either the Midwest or Mid-South region.

The move is part of a grand design hatched in Washington by White House political strategists and the AFL-CIO. Aside from ACORN, Big Labor's spokesmen are the most prominent backers of the initiative campaign. In their crosshairs are hard-pressed small business people across Missouri, already facing enormous challenges in complying with the countless roadblocks government places in their path. It is worth noting that these small businesses are America's and Missouri's great engines of job creation in today's era of down-sizing and layoffs by the Fortune 500.

Today, jobs and businesses and the scarce capital indispensable to their creation are more movable than ever. Any state that gets its costs out of line risks enormous economic damage -- literally a potential economic catastrophe. Such a huge increase in the minimum wage would, overnight, make Missouri's economic climate uncompetitive and destroy literally thousands of jobs, nearly all at the crucial, entry level of employment.

So who would be hurt the most? The very working poor and entry-level employees whom backers of the increase say they want to help. This is a prescription for cutting off the lowest rung on the economic ladder of opportunity. Study after study has shown the minimum wage to be a job destroyer, especially for teen-agers and others just beginning to learn essential work habits. Between these youngsters and seniors working part-time to supplement retirement incomes, you have the vast majority of minimum-wage workers. Almost none are heads of households, a fact that goes undisputed by backers of the initiative.

Most economic decisions are made at the margin, involving calculations by an employer as to whether he or she can afford the cost of hiring an unskilled worker. A businessperson must ask, "Is the productivity I can expect from this new employee worth the higher cost, at the margin?" Pass the ACORN initiative, and the guaranteed answer is no, as Missourians watch jobs, capital and businesses flee to other states. The stakes on this one are high indeed.