title:  WATCH: Fox Business Misses The Days Of Child Labor And No Minimum Wage
text: Many new minimum wage increases took effect on Friday, and Fox was quick to lose their sh*t over it.Fox Business host Stuart Varney discovered that $15 minimum wage laws go into effect today in 15 cities across five states, and proceeded to wax nostalgic along with his panel of guests about the days when there were no minimum wage laws or child labor laws in this country.Panelist Tammy Bruce warned that it will a cause  a march towards robotics  as if robots taking over a jobs is something that s never happened before.  You re going to have kiosks that are going to be able to sell things to people,  she continued. This we ve learned from Seattle, and some other cities that have already implemented it, that jobs are lost. That this, it s   the burden is put on the back of other struggling people. You will fire individuals in order to maintain that the salary requirement of the others that you have there. And others, of course, are putting   fast-food places are putting in robotics, and kiosks, so you can order your own food. This is what s going to happen. In fact, the Seattle minimum wage increase has not caused the sky to fall as Bruce and her Fox colleagues have been claiming since it was first passed. Many workers are bringing home more money to pay bills and take care of their families. Prices for products have not shot up as conservatives warned and it s still too early to tell if the wage increase is slowing job growth.Varney then turned to WWE has-been John Layfield, who makes a living being a loudmouth on television. Layfield spoke from the nation of Bermuda, and giddily explained that Bermuda does not have a minimum wage and that children work for tips.LAYFIELD: There actually isn t a minimum wage here, right now. You see some of these young kids   I run a program for at-risk kids   down, sacking groceries, about age 12, and they work off tips. So there isn t actually a minimum wage here.BRUCE: That s how it used to be.LAYFIELD: And it actually works fine. The problem I have with this $15 minimum wage is why 15, because it looks good on a bumper sticker? You re not talking about fixing anything. Tie it to inflation, or a basket of wages, so you take it out of politics and union hands. That s all it is.Except that it s really not working fine. As it turns out, there is a significant income gap in Bermuda and poverty affects many locals because unskilled workers from overseas are willing to work for very little which means great wealth for those who don t have to pay their workers very much because there is no minimum wage law. And children are forced to help out by working for nothing more than the hope of a decent tip.But Varney continnued to whine about the wage increases here in the states because people in poverty will now be able to bring in $30,000 a year. Panelist Elizabeth McDonald complained because she thinks anyone in an  entry-level job  should be in poverty, even if they have a family to support. She even claimed that college tuition will go up because young workers are making more.VARNEY: $15 an hour, for a forty hour week, is $30,000 a year. I mean, what  ELIZABETH MACDONALD: It s supposed to be an entry-level job, it s not supposed to be a career. And, by the way, AWOL in this debate   when you have things in the [Obama] administration like raising overtime pay depending on the skill set, and minimum wages, watch out college tuition goes up.VARNEY: That s right, because of all those people who work minimum wage in the colleges. You ve got that right.Of course, college prices were going up long before the minimum wage increase came into being. But don t tell that to Fox Business. The truth will hurt their feelings, if they have any.Here s the video via Media Matters.The bottom line is that increasing the minimum wage is not only fair it helps the economy in general.Every year, corporate fat cats receive salary increases of millions of dollars while the workers who make the business successful see their wages stagnate. This forces many workers to apply for federal aid to make ends meet. Raising the wage helps workers take care of their families and makes it unnecessary for a lot of them to apply for aid. It also helps boost the local economy because workers will use their increased earnings to buy goods, thus pumping more dollars into area businesses that will use those extra profits to pay their own workers a higher wage and hire extra workers if there is more demand.In other words, Fox hosts are fearmongering again and if they had their way, Americans would work for pennies and children would work for even less.Featured image via screen capture