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“Democrats in the House and Senate reintroduced a bill Tuesday to raise the U.S. minimum wage to $15 per hour.” CNBC
The right opposes raising the minimum wage.
An “analysis, published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, combed through academic literature on the minimum wage and determined that nearly 80 percent of studies conducted since 1992 have found that an increased minimum wage leads to a decrease in the level of employment…
“The effects are particularly pronounced for teenagers, for whom just one study indicates a significant increase in employment, compared with 18 that find a negative and significant effect. This observation is particularly significant given recent research evidence that finds that minimum-wage increases can lead to an increase in property crime, as young and marginally skilled people are pushed out of the labor market and instead commit crimes to get by.”
Charles Fain Lehman, Washington Free Beacon
“The Congressional Budget Office looked at what would happen if we were to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and they found that it would reduce the number of jobs in the low-wage labor market by 1.3 million. That’s a reasonable estimate, but I think they’re lowballing it. I think you would see significantly more jobs lost, coupled with a large drop in the number of people getting hired. While we don’t have a lot of evidence on what happens when you raise a minimum wage to $15 an hour, Seattle had pretty severe employment reductions when wages hit $13 an hour. So I think a $15 national minimum wage mandate would be really devastating to the low-wage labor market.”
Michael R. Strain, American Enterprise Institute
“When workers make more, who pays for it? Well, some mix of business owners and customers, though the precise blend is disputed. Notably, many low-wage employers, such as discount retailers and fast-food restaurants, serve lots of low-income customers, and most minimum-wage workers do not live in poor households (because, for example, they’re teenagers or second earners). This policy, therefore, doesn’t just transfer money from well-to-do business owners to poor workers, but also from poor customers to middle-class workers…
“If we think people should be paid more, we should subsidize their wages with tax dollars. At least that way we’ll know who’s paying and who’s benefiting before we set the process in motion, we won’t single out the customers and employers of low-wage workers for punishment, and we won’t risk throwing people out of their jobs.”
Robert Verbruggen, National Review
“Costs of living vary significantly across the United States… It’s one thing if cities like Seattle and San Francisco, or even states like New York and Illinois want to impose $15 minimum wages on their workers and businesses. If they set minimum wages above market wages, workers and employers who are priced out of the market at least have the option of going elsewhere to earn a living…
“[In Mississippi] the median wage is $15 per hour. That means that half of all workers in Mississippi earn less than $15 per hour, and half earn more. Imposing a $15 minimum wage on Mississippi would be like imposing a $21.24 minimum wage on California, a $24.14 minimum wage on Massachusetts, and a whopping $35.74 minimum wage on DC. A $35.74 minimum wage in DC would have a lot of lawmakers scrambling to run their offices, considering they currently pay many congressional staffers $20 per hour or less…
“Puerto Rico demonstrates the consequences of an excessively high minimum wage. The federal $7.25 minimum wage equals 72% of the island’s median wage of $10.13. That’s forced many people out of employment entirely—the island has an abysmally low 40% labor force participation rate, and over 40% of residents receive Medicaid and food stamps.”
Rachel Greszler, Daily Wire
The left supports raising the minimum wage.
The left supports raising the minimum wage.
“[This is] a fight Democrats should be eager to take on… The first reason is that people need it. At an hourly rate of $7.25 you’re making less than $15,000 a year, which is almost impossible for one person to live on, let alone feed and house a family. Second, minimum wage increases are incredibly popular. Polls regularly show them supported by clear majorities, and pretty much every time a state minimum wage increase is on the ballot, it passes easily. There have been 23 minimum wage ballot initiatives since 1998, and every one has succeeded. The latest was in Florida this past November, where Trump won but an initiative raising the minimum to $15 an hour passed by over 20 points.”
Paul Waldman, Washington Post
“The country’s very low minimum wage comes at a high cost. And for taxpayers, it adds up to more than $100 billion a year. That number comes from a new analysis of safety-net usage by Ken Jacobs, Ian Eve Perry, and Jenifer MacGillvary of UC Berkeley’s Labor Center. It identifies working families with at least one member who would get a raise if the federal minimum wage were lifted to $15 an hour, and finds that the government spends about $107 billion a year on Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), cash welfare, food stamps, and the earned-income tax credit for those families… Raising the minimum wage would not just help them escape poverty. It would also help the government’s bottom line.”
Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic
Dated But Relevant: “The conventional wisdom held that productivity growth was the only route to higher wages. Through that lens, efforts to negotiate or require higher wages were counterproductive…
“In the real world, things are more complicated. Wages are influenced by a tug of war between employers and workers, and employers have been winning. One clear piece of evidence is the yawning divergence between productivity growth and wage growth since roughly 1970. Productivity has more than doubled; wages have lagged far behind. The point is not that economists were completely wrong. Productivity obviously plays a role in determining wages. McDonald’s cannot pay workers more money than it collects from its customers. But economists were partly and consequentially wrong. Power mattered, too.”
Editorial Board, New York Times
“Don’t be persuaded by the argument that companies can’t afford to embrace higher wages. While it’s true that some employers can’t afford to pay more, many can. The 1,000 largest public companies by market value employ tens of millions of people, and the median pay at roughly half of them is below a living wage. As a group, those companies have been more profitable in recent years than ever before and are widely expected to return to record profitability after the pandemic. Paying workers a living wage is a question of willingness, not ability, for much of corporate America…
“Any setbacks in hiring that a higher minimum wage might introduce to poor areas, small businesses or recession-battered companies can be addressed easily with some minor policy tweaks.”
Nir Kaissar and Timothy L. O'Brien, Bloomberg
Some suggest, “[1] give low-wage areas a partial exemption from the federal minimum wage -- for example, make it $12 instead of $15. That will greatly reduce any danger of unemployment. It might even entice a few employers to shift to the low-wage areas, giving them some much-needed growth… [2] allow the government to lower the minimum wage temporarily in case of a severe recession… [3] allow small businesses to have slightly lower minimum wages… These are not difficult tweaks, and they could help make sure that the $15 minimum wage doesn't suffer a backlash.”
Noah Smith, Bloomberg
