Minimum Wage

July 31, 2019

Is Pete Buttigieg right that opposing a $15 minimum wage ‘taunts’ God?

Are those who oppose raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour transgressing the Scripture and mocking the Lord God Almighty? One might get that impression from watching Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, when one of the participants explicitly made that argument. Continue Reading...

July 22, 2019

Bernie Sanders: The apologist for inequality

Since Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for president in the 2020 election, he has brought a seemingly disastrous and looming problem to the attention of the American people, much like he did in his 2016 run: income inequality accompanied by the tyrannical rule of the elite 1%. Continue Reading...

July 22, 2019

Bernie Sanders’s workers wanted $15 an hour—so he cut their hours

On Friday I mentioned the ongoing labor dispute between the workers and management of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. The longtime advocate of raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour is finding that it’s easy to complain about greedy employers until you become the one having to make payroll. Continue Reading...

July 19, 2019

Bernie Sanders cares more about unions than he does his own workers

Who would have predicted that the hottest labor dispute of the summer would be between the workers and management of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign? Sanders is a long-time champion of raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour, so his campaign workers assumed they’d earn that level of pay too: Campaign field hires have demanded an annual salary they say would be equivalent to a $15-an-hour wage, which Sanders for years has said should be the federal minimum. Continue Reading...

July 12, 2019

Can summer jobs reduce violent crime?

Several decades of social science has shown a correlation between joblessness among disadvantaged youth and violent crime. While remediation has not been shown to lead to prevention, there is some evidence that summer jobs can. Continue Reading...

July 10, 2019

Democrats propose to eliminate over a million jobs held by the working poor

The Democratic presidential candidates are in agreement on a proposal to eliminate 1.3 million jobs nationwide. That’s not the way they would frame the issue, of course. Saying that you will eliminate over a million jobs held by the poorest people in America is not exactly a winning message. Continue Reading...

April 03, 2019

How the minimum wage affected workers during (and after) the Great Recession

The law of demand is one of the most fundamental concepts of economics. This law states that, if all other factors remain equal, the higher the price of a good, the less people will demand that good. Continue Reading...

March 18, 2019

Economists agree: Don’t raise the minimum wage to $15

When it comes to policy choices, professional economists are famous for being overly circumspect. President Harry Truman once complained, “Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, ‘on one hand . Continue Reading...

February 21, 2019

Why the minimum wage shouldn’t be a family wage

Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and one that seems to a have particular potent effect on politicians. Consider, for example, a recent tweet by Massachusetts’s senator and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. Continue Reading...

November 30, 2018

How the $15 minimum wage is pushing New York’s car washers to the margins

As protests for a $15-per-hour minimum wage continue to rage across the country, cities like Seattle and Minneapolis and states like California and New York have begun to adopt such schemes, leading to a range of unfortunate case studies in economic destruction. Continue Reading...

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