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@Vader
I've been told that $10-12 minimum wage would be beneficial, but I've heard $15 would destroy small businesses
..."I concluded the weight of the evidence points to a fairly small impact
of higher minimum wages on employment, even as they significantly
increase the earnings of low paid workers."...
..." What
does “fairly small” mean, in this context? I looked at 55 different
academic studies of episodes where a minimum wage was introduced or
raised — 36 in the United States, 11 in other developed countries. I
found that for the typical study in the middle of the range of
demonstrated effects, when average pay of affected workers rises by 10
percent after a mandated wage increase, their employment falls by at
most 2 percent. But the studies that found job losses of that scale
large tended to focus on narrow groups of affected workers (often teens
or young adults) — who may be particularly affected. When I focused on
studies that looked at overall low-wage workforce, the evidence on job
losses were minute: In those cases, the job loss from the same 10
percent increase in average wage of affected workers amounts to maybe
0.5 percent. At that level of job loss, the wage gains far offset the
losses: The low-wage workforce as a whole is better off from the policy.
..
I and several colleagues conducted an even more thorough analysis in a 2019 study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
We examined the effects of 138 state-level minimum wage increases from
1979 to 2016 in the United States. Comparing states that increased their
minimum wages with states that did not, we found the change in
employment (in the five years after the change occurred) took place in a
narrow band around the new minimum wage:
....Understandably, jobs paying
below the minimum decreased — since wages rose. But at least as many
jobs were added at the new, higher wage — meaning jobs were upgraded,
not destroyed. All told, the number of low wage jobs barely budged. This
finding held when we looked at populations of special concern — people
with fewer educational credentials, for instance, or young workers.
....The
finding held, as well, even when the minimum wage was set at a fairly
high rate compared with the state’s median wage (the highest being
around 60 percent of the median wage). We found no effect on employment
at levels significantly above the minimum wage."....
Ebuc..more on reasons why other comet to differrent findings at the above link. Ex;
..."One study that skeptics of the minimum wage like to cite, for example,
conducted by researchers at the University of Washington, examined the
effect of an increase in the minimum wage in Seattle from $9.47 per hour
to as much as $11 in 2015 — and then to as much as $13 in 2016. They
found the second wage increase reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by
around 9 percent, while wages increased by about 3 percent — for a net
loss in the typical low-wage employees’ earnings of about $125 per
month. That’s a big deal — if true."...
However....."But that analysis [ latter above ]didn’t sufficiently take into account Seattle’s status
as an outlier “superstar” city, one where factors beside the minimum
wage shape wages on the low end, in the ways described above. In fact, in a follow-up study,
the same researchers, using a different methodology, found something
much more in line with the consensus. In that analysis, they found the
wage increase “brought benefits to many workers employed at the time,
while leaving few employed workers worse off,” as a New York Times summary of that paper put it."...
Ebuc Herman Cain again........."America’s first minimum-wage law, passed by Congress in 1938, allowed
states to set a lower wage for tipped workers, but it wasn’t until the
’60s that labor advocates persuaded Congress to adopt a federal tipped
minimum wage that increased in tandem with the regular minimum wage.
....In
1996, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain, who was then head of the
National Restaurant Association, helped convince a Republican-led
Congress to decouple the two wages. The tipped minimum has been stuck at
$2.13 ever since.".....
