KINDER'S COMMENTARY: ACORN's WAGE BID IS DANGEROUS

"If this initiative passes, next year in St. Louis ACORN will seek signatures to increase the minimum wage to $7.60 per hour." -- Craig Robbins, executive director of the Association for Community Reform Now, quoted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch June 29.

Anyone who thinks that the radical leftists at ACORN, in league with their cohorts among Missouri Democrats, are finished trying to wound small businesses and snuff out the jobs they create should reflect long and hard on the above-excerpted burst of candor. These folks have designs far beyond this year's proposal to hike the minimum wage, which is likely, when signatures are counted, to qualify for the November ballot. Like this year's proposed initiative, ACORN's plans down the road are daggers aimed at the small business owners of Missouri and a job-killer of the first magnitude.

One wishes it weren't so. In a perfect world where pigs could fly and every girl resembles Michelle Pfeiffer or Sandra Bullock, politicians could simply wave a wand and without the slightest pain, magically increase the price of labor. As last week's downing of TWA Flight 800 so brutally reminds us, however, ours isn't a perfect world. Together with the inescapable fact of scarcity, the law of supply and demand pays no heed to the absurd political rhetoric of the moment. These facts operate just as surely as does the law of gravity. And those laws, together with bitter experience, teach us that the ACORN proposal will have dire consequences. Here are just a few that will flow from it:

* Low-skilled adults in states that increased their minimum wage were often crowded out of the job market by teens and students. -- Kevin Lang, Boston University, 1995.

* "Any benefits to low-income workers (from higher minimum wages) don't outweigh the reduction in employment that results." -- Chicago Tribune.

* It would dramatically increase the dropout rate among teens in Missouri. -- David Newmark, Michigan State University, 1995.

* Would raising the minimum wage help single parents? Only 4.4 percent of the benefits from a higher minimum wage would go to single mothers with children at home. -- Dave McPherson of Florida State University and William Even of Miami University.

* What impact would a higher minimum wage have on welfare reform? Welfare mothers in states that raise their minimum wage spend up to 44 percent longer on public assistance than welfare recipients in other states. -- Peter Brandon, University of Wisconsin, 1995.

Keep in mind that 70 percent of Missouri jobs are near the borders of our state. If the ACORN proposal passes, employers will be sorely tempted to move across the state line and take their jobs with them, to a place where small business owners aren't held in such contempt.

While we're at it, a special place in small-business purgatory (if not hell) should be reserved for Gov. Mel Carnahan and his sidekick, Lt. Gov. Roger Wilson. Earlier this year, both these high officeholders signed the ACORN petition, thus helping qualify for this proposal for the ballot. And simultaneously, both committed an act of political cowardice which, I submit, is without parallel in recent Missouri history. Their singular contribution to the annals of all-time political cowardice was to sign the petition in public and then immediately announce that their signatures didn't necessarily signify their support for the measure, but rather only that they thought the people should have the right to vote on it.

Oh. Thanks, Mel. Thanks, Roger.

Mel and Roger should visit with a constituent of mine and theirs who called me from Sikeston, terrified of what the ACORN proposal will mean for him. The owner of three small franchise sandwich shops, he said his sales were flat to down anyway in this brutally competitive industry. He will be forced to lay off workers, possibly close a store.

The stakes are large, indeed. Missourians will have to work their way through the fog of lies and half-truths on this one and just do the right thing: Defeat the ACORN proposal.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.