My wife and I have a mixed marriage. She’s a Florida Gators fan. I’m a Notre Dame Fighting Irish fan. Neither of us attended these institutions, but nevertheless, we have strong feelings about their respective football teams. As with most marriages, you tend to learn to love — or at least tolerate — the things that your spouse loves. That is the case with the Gators. I’ve watched just about every minute of Florida Gator football from this past season, which meant carving out time this fall to spend with my wife cheering her team onto victory.

Of course, we watched last night’s BCS Championship match-up between the Gators and the Ohio State Buckeyes. It was just a few short years ago that I cheered for Ohio State when they met Miami in the national championship game. I don’t like Miami at all, and I do have a certain affinity for Big Ten football, having grown up in Illinois. However, last night, we were behind the Gators in their drubbing of the Buckeyes.

Today, all the Buckeye apologists have emerged, making excuses for the loss. Rather than waste everyone’s time trying to answer them, I’d like to take up one claim that I think has some validity.

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It’s that time of year again, when everyone’s prognosticating about what will happen during this new year.

Eternal optimist Pat Robertson has weighed in:

In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in “mass killing” late in 2007.

“I’m not necessarily saying it’s going to be nuclear,” he said during his news-and-talk television show “The 700 Club” on the Christian Broadcasting Network. “The Lord didn’t say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that.”

Robertson doesn’t have a great track record with his predictions. In 2006, he claimed a tsunami would hit the U.S.

In related news, a new poll shows that 25 percent of Americans believe that Jesus Christ may return in the year 2007. At least we may have that going for us.

The Democrats took control of the House and the Senate today. They’re intent on pushing through part of their progressive agenda quickly — as in the first 100 hours. One piece of that agenda includes raising the minimum wage. Currently, the minimum wage is $5.15 an hour. That works out to about $10,000 a year. That’s not much, but then again, the number of full-time workers actually making minimum wage is quite small. Because the minimum wage hasn’t been raised since 1997, Democrats want to slowly increase the wage to $7.25 an hour. President Bush been sympathetic to this cause, as long as it includes some tax breaks for small businesses who would feel the brunt of the wage hike. Many states have already passed laws raising the minimum wage to considerably more than its current national rate.
George Will argues that the minimum wage should be $0 an hour:

But the minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities’ prices. Washington, which has its hands full delivering the mail and defending the shores, should let the market do well what Washington does poorly

As someone who actually made minimum wage when it was around $4 an hour, I tend to agree with Will. My problem with the minimum wage is that it’s an artificial control that doesn’t achieve anything. No one can really live on $5.15 an hour. If the purpose of setting a minimum is to ensure some quality of life for that worker, then $10,000 a year is a pretty bad standard. If the government is going to control wages, how about a living wage, as some progressives have argued. Set that wage at $12 an hour, which is roughly $25,000. Again, it’s not a lot of money, but it’s a lot closer to a livable wage in most places than $5.15.

The problem, though, is that setting a wage at that level is going to put a lot of people out of work. Employers will have to cut their payrolls to accommodate such a hike, which means a lot of people who are just scraping by now would making no wages at all.

The only logical solution, to me, would be to abolish the federal minimum wage and allow states to set their own minimums if they wish. Let the market set wages. In the long run, wages will rise and workers will ultimately benefit.