Minimum wage updates: paging Mayor Jackson!

 art credit: The Tunnel Wall

The Washington Post reports that the state of Maine’s House voted on a bill to reduce the minimum wage for tipped restaurant workers. An earlier Cleveland Tea Party blog reported on Mayor Frank Jackson’s hopes of increasing the minimum wage for City of Cleveland employees.

Today, Thomas Lifson at American Thinker has more on the minimum wage debate:

Minimum wage laws are a perfect example of feel-good statism, in which the professed goal is noble, but the execution inevitably fails and makes things worse.  The state can no more repeal the law of supply and demand than it can the law of gravity.

But don't tell that to the Seattle City Council, which just commissioned a new study intended to get the answer it wants, from a scholar who has contended, in effect, that supply and demand don't really work at the bottom of the wage scale.  The wonderful thing about working with numbers is that by choosing baselines, time periods, and sample bias, you can find almost whatever you want.  As a graduate student who got a Ph.D. in sociology, I saw this clearly and was sickened by people openly proud of the ways in which they got to the conclusions they wanted for ideological reasons.  Nobel laureate Ronald Coase famously summed it up: "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess."

Will somebody tell Mayor Frank Jackson?

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Mayor Jackson proposes increase to minimum wage for Cleveland employees

Photo credit: Washington Retail Assoc.

Cleveland.com reports that Mayor Frank Jackson intends to raise the minimum wage for City employees, so that in order to

raise up the earning power of the bottom end of the workforce. 

The change would affect as many as 500 employees in a wide array of jobs, ranging from clerical and custodial staff to park and recreation workers to police and fire cadets. The workers are both full time and part time, union and non-union. 

InfoWars reports on the actual results of the city of Seattle’s decision to raise the minimum wage:

Helping the “forgotten man” was an important and successful message for President Donald Trump in his election campaign.

He tapped into the anxieties of many Americans who are struggling to find work and are watching as traditional industries disappear or are gobbled up by automation.

While some of this development has been natural, much has been artificially created by bad policies. In particular: the minimum wage.

A bombshell report was released Monday about the impact of minimum wage hikes in Seattle, Washington. The study, conducted by economists at the University of Washington, showed that minimum wage laws significantly decreased employment for lower-income workers.

Additionally, the report found that average hours for low-income employees had also declined since Seattle’s $13 minimum wage law began being implemented in 2015.

Another idea that sounds good at first, until you consider the consequences, both intended and unintended. Speaking of consequences, elsewhere we read that Jeff Bezos’s purchase of Whole Foods will be followed by replacing employees with robotics in the warehouse.

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