Twofer

We get two good opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal today.

1. Student Loan backfire: Default rates don’t lie.

Whereas credit scores used to be similar for young people with or without student-loan debt, New York Fed economists find a divergence after 2008. “By 2012, the average score for twenty-five-year-old nonborrowers is 15 points above that for student borrowers, and the average score for thirty-year-old nonborrowers is 24 points above that for student borrowers,” they note in a recent report.

If I were running for office, I would promise to give student loan borrowers more loans to help pay off their loans.

2. Michael Saltzman gives an economics lesson to VP Joe Biden.

Advocates of a higher minimum wage arbitrarily selected 1968 as the historical reference point. It’s no wonder: That’s when federal minimum wage hit its inflation-adjusted high point.

How about picking other arbitrary years to track the minimum wage and inflation? If you used 1948 instead of 1968, the minimum wage’s inflation-adjusted value would only be $3.81 an hour. If you chose 1988, the adjusted minimum wage would be $6.50 an hour.

And, if we pick a time before the minimum wage existed, it would be $0. What a distraction. I wish I lived in a world where when someone suggested raising the minimum wage to ‘help’ someone (get votes), everyone just laughed at them.