The average weekly wage in the education and health services sector is $ in the professional and business services sector it is $ and in the mining sector, the average weekly wage is $ Together these three sectors account for 68 percent of the jobs that have been created in Texas in the past two years. I should point out that in 2010, 9.5 percent of hourly workers in Texas earned at or below the federal minimum wage, a share that exceeds the national average of 6 percent. California’s share was 2 percent and New York’s was 6.5 percent. Texas and New York do not have a state minimum wage that is higher than the federal minimum wage.1 At least 17 states do have minimum wages that are above the federal level of $ California’s minimum wage, for example, is $ The agricultural sector has a relatively high share of minimum wage workers. Approximately 2 percent of Texas’ workers are in the ag sector, whereas 1.1 percent of California’s workforce and a mere 0.5 percent of New York’s workforce are employed in agriculture. This is true especially in the border area, which also has many migrant workers and where the level of education is relatively low. Finally, Texas has a younger workforce than the nation,  1  4  See “Minimum Wage Workers in Texas,” http://www.bls.gov/ro6/fax/minwage_tx.htm.
But I have suggested to my colleagues that while many companies have begun and will likely continue to raise prices to counter rising costs that derive from a range of factors – including the run-up of commodity prices in 2010 and increases in the costs of production in China – weak demand is beginning to temper the ability of providers of goods and services to significantly raise prices to consumers. My concern is with the transmission mechanism for activating the use of the liquidity we have created, which remains on the sidelines of the economy. I posit that nonmonetary factors, not monetary policy, are retarding the willingness and ability of job creators to put to work the liquidity that we have provided. I have spoken to this many times in public. Those with the capacity to hire American workers – small businesses as well as large, publicly traded or private – are immobilized. Not because they lack entrepreneurial zeal or do not wish to grow; not because they can’t access cheap and available credit. Rather, they simply cannot budget or manage for the uncertainty of fiscal and regulatory policy. In an environment where they are already uncertain of potential growth in demand for their goods and services and have yet to see a significant pickup in top-line revenue, there is palpable angst surrounding the cost of doing business. According to my business contacts, the opera buffa of the debt ceiling negotiations compounded this uncertainty, leaving business decisionmakers frozen in their tracks.