cepr.net [PDF] · #economics
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TL;DR: there's some compensation in small price increases and lower labor turnover, but for the most part it's just not that big of an expense.
These days the minimum wage is so laughably low (in real dollars it's a small fraction of its historical high) that of course it doesn't have an effect on employment. I have no idea how anyone, let alone a single mother or father, could work for minimum wage. Even, say, $10/hr would be a brutal wage to try to raise a kid on. I think in order to really study whether minimum wage affects employment and economic growth, one would have to have a minimum wage that is in the ballpark of a minimum living wage. In that case, we could see what the effects are and have a debate about it. I worked one minimum wage job back in (I believe) 1997, and my only raise was from $4.75 to $5.15 (the minimum wage was increased that summer). The job was at a golf course parking carts, and I was 15 years old. When your biggest concern is buying a dime of skanky weed, you can handle that low of an hourly rate, but I don't know what other segment of society could.
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swearitwasntme · 4039 days ago · link ·
Agreed. I'm thinking maybe this was the wrong site to post this on. I'm a liberal and heavily in favor of policies that would help out the lowest earners, but I like to consider arguments that I think might convince the other side on their own terms, or at least address common objections. So I hope it wasn't too offensive to look at things from the hypothetical perspective that there could be something wrong with increasing minimum wage. I think your points about examining a the effects of raising minimum wage from a higher starting point would make for a good followup study, if one could tease out the effects of skill from differences in earnings in some other bracket.
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I'm not sure what would have been offensive, so I don't think you really need to worry about that. There are some resident conservatives on here who probably have a different take, but for the most part, I think most of the regular contributors here are left leaning. Anyway, this is a conservative group, and even they conclude that the minimum wage is negligible in terms of negative effects on the economy.
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swearitwasntme · 4039 days ago · link ·
Yeah, but if you look at it with a small enough sample size...
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swearitwasntme · 4039 days ago · link ·
Huh. I interpreted this in exactly the opposite direction: that because raising the minimum wage doesn't decrease employment much, "raising it will just cause less hiring" is not a valid excuse not to.