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Originally Posted by samsonh
Wil,
You realize multiple studies have come out recently showing those place with an increased minimum wage are doing BETTER?
I'm always open to data. Prove it to me.
It doesn't take much to google "minimum wage laws" and start seeing some very interesting articles. Some for, some against. But, as always, and I'll repeat that - AS ALWAYS, you have to be very careful about the data you are looking at and how it's being reported.
For example :
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michael.../#11677868156a
The headlines were ebullient: "Minimum Wage Increase Hasn't Killed Jobs in Seattle." So said a report from a team of researchers affiliated with the University of California-Berkeley, timed for the three-year anniversary of the law.
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray conveniently had an infographic designed and ready to go for the study's release. His office excitedly tweeted that the policy had "raised food workers' pay, without negative impact on employment," linking to an uploaded study version on the Mayor's personal .gov website rather than a University domain.
Sounds good, right? Not so fast.
Nuanced conclusions like this one don't lend themselves to celebratory press releases like the one the Mayor's office put out yesterday. Enter the Berkeley team, which always arrives at the same positive conclusion on minimum wage no matter the number: In their view, a higher minimum wage is always a good thing.
In an expose published last year, the Albany Times-Union used emails obtained via public records request to explore the motivations of the Berkeley team:
The Times Union was recently provided hundreds of pages of emails among minimum wage advocates, Jacobs and other Berkeley academics, demonstrating a deep level of coordination between academics and advocates....
The Berkeley Labor Center has done at least six other studies on the minimum wage in California municipalities, all showing that a wage increase would be beneficial. In fact, Jacobs could not name a study conducted by Berkeley that said raising wages would have an overall negative impact. ...
Given this history of identical results, it's not surprising that the Murray administration in Seattle was anxious to have a copy of the predictably-positive Berkeley report to tout on the third anniversary of its minimum wage law.
The wage floor is still rising in Seattle, and there are more chapters to write on the city's minimum wage experiment. But if accuracy if the goal, the Berkeley team is not the right choice to author them.
Here's another:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.d649e40c42e2
It's never a good sign when the argument relies on mischaracterizing evidence. Hanauer's description of the work of Council of Economic Advisers chair Alan Krueger and UC Berkeley economist David Card on the minimum wage is incomplete, to put it generously. Hanauer writes that Card and Krueger show that, "contrary to conventional economic orthodoxy, increases in the minimum wage increase employment." And it's true that in two papers from the 1990s, one on the fast food industry and the other by Card on the state-by-state effect of federal increases in the minimum wage, the team found modest increases in employment follow an hike.
The bigger problem, though, is that there's been a lot of work on the minimum wage since Card and Krueger, much of which contradicts their findings. David Neumark at UC - Irvine and William Wascher of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors concluded in a 2007 review of the literature that a solid majority of studies find that minimum wage increases reduce employment, while very few, if any, provide convincing evidence that it increases employment.
And there are studies from other researchers backing up both Neumark/Wascher and Dube. A recent study from economists at the London School of Economics and the central bank of Turkey found higher minimum wages increased unemployment, while Berkeley’s Laura Giuliano found no effects, as does the Center for Economic and Policy Research's John Schmitt. It's fair to say that this is an empirical question on which labor economists are divided, though Neumark and Wascher's literature review suggests that the bulk of the research on the topic points to negative effects on employment.
As with everything from the left, you have to actually really dig and look into things to see if they are correct. The left cherry-picks data to make it look like what they are doing is correct/moral/beneficial. It is the same with climate science. It is the same with the energy industry (which I happen to know a lot about). Liberal data is suspect, you MUST dig into it to see how it is determined. Minimum wage benefits are the same.
I actually wish a major city in the United States would jack the Minimum Wage to 25 or 50 or 100 dollars an hour so we can really see what happens. I'm totally down for that. I'd hope a city on the West coast would do it.
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Also nice to see you have zero grasp how trade works! Remember when the GOP was the party of free trade? I do.
I suppose you are also in favor of ethanol subsidies like the president talked about last night?
I'm too tired to look either of these up right now, as I've been up for quite a while. Night shifts are hard. I'll deal with this later.