TOW 18

With the raise of minimum wage being an important part of President Obama’s plans the editorial board of the New York Times decided to weigh in.  With the Times being a liberal based group the opinions of the piece match suit.  The opinion of the piece was that the raise of the minimum wage would be a positive move, and the authors tried to structure the piece to make it clear.  The essay uses a structure in which they state a question frequently asked about minimum wage in general and then they answer said question.  The structure is often effective as it allows the author to logically answer the question while also focusing the readers’ thoughts.  In this case however this strategy was not as effective.  This was because the answers were weakly defended.  Answering questions that you get to hand pick should be simple enough and also easy to back up, but that is where this essay fails.  It answers the questions with an ideological outlook that does not delve deeper into issues and that does not consider the greater consequences of any choice.  One of the greatest examples of this is in the last section.  The last section deals with whether or not it cuts jobs to equate the money spent in the pay hikes.  They answer that it doesn’t kill jobs because, “Instead, they pay up out of savings from reduced labor turnover, by slower wage increases higher up the scale, modest price increases or other adjustments.”  So, it doesn’t kill jobs because they will find a way to pay for them.  This is one of the many logical fallacies that harm the essays ethos and cause it to gain less effect through its well set up structure.  If it was to take out these fallacies and was to be written with more thorough answering of the questions it’s asking it could be an effective paper, but in its current state the structure serves no benefit.