Abolish the Federal Minimum Wage
The idea that the federal minimum wage should exist in some form may sound beyond debate to most Americans, the vast majority of whom have not lived in a time when it wasn’t a political reality. The debate is arguably settled, but maybe not in the way most think.
“There’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed,” wrote a prominent newspaper’s editorial board a few years back. “Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market….If a higher minimum means fewer jobs, why does it remain on the agenda of some liberals?”
It’s a good question, which The New York Times posed to its readers in January 1987. “The right minimum wage,” the paper’s editorial board wrote, is “$0.00.”
The editorial board has since changed its position. The basic economics, however, have not changed.
Those basics are sometimes difficult to suss out in a conversation riddled with partisanship. That’s because they’re nuanced—something the Times credibly outlined almost four decades ago. “A higher minimum would undoubtedly raise the living standard of the majority of low-wage workers who could keep their jobs,” the editorial board wrote. “That gain, it is argued, would justify the sacrifice of the minority who became unemployable. The argument isn’t convincing.”
Compare that with research released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in 2019: “For most low-wage workers, earnings and family income would increase, which would lift some families out of poverty,” the agency concluded. “But other low-wage workers would become jobless, and their family income would fall—in some cases, below the poverty threshold.”
That should sound familiar. Yet a few months later, the Times endorsed the proposal that the CBO was responding to: a $15 federa
Article from Reason.com
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