Santa Fe has made news recently with plans to increase the City’s minimum wage to as much as $10.32. This is certainly not a cause for celebration. Rather, as the Hoover Institute points out in a new brief, “As the wage demanded increases, the jobs offered in the labor market will decline.”
The paper goes on to note that, “after the wage level was increased, unemployment rates did move sharply upward. Some of today’s workers will be lucky enough to ride the living-wage tide upward, but others are likely to be cast aside.” These and other regulations have not made the City a high-unemployment city, but Santa Fe continues to grow less-quickly than other cities in the state.
Of course, it is only intuitive that forcing businesses to pay more for employees will reduce employment, but it bears repeating.
Epstein makes a fundamental error; he says that unemployment raised after the minimum wage raised but does not look at other variables. For example, the global economic collapse, which had a huge effect on employment throughout the country.
Epstein uses no numbers in his piece to justify what he says — and dismisses a study that shows higher wages can increase employment because… well, he never really says why.
It’s just common sense that it’s more attractive to be able to get two for just a bit more than the price of one. And it gets a second person into the job market. The minimum wage argument is simply a political posturing ploy to make the great unwashed think one is all heart. Let the free market breathe, and get government to hell out of it!
IF minimum wage laws DO NO harm to employment, then lets go for the gusto – $100/hr for hamburger flippers. These ‘poor people’ deserve it right?
These liberal economic geniuses will then tell us there will be no ill effects on employment rates or the price of hamburgers to the public. How many burgers will they buy at $20 each? When the market refuses to pay such exorbitant prices, how many burgerflippers will lose their jobs? That there is no effect on prices when labor inputs increase is a patently false thesis.
Many of our politicos are economic dunces, and the ignorant dupes that are the public swallow these insane ideas, mistaking this liberal excrement for ‘caring and compassion for the little people.’
What is gained by the politicos controlling and bleeding any market? Higher prices, a lower standard of living, while THEY get more control.
Call me cynical, perhaps the liberal polticos may not be stupid after all, just sleazy snake oil salesmen armed with the gospel of the ‘free lunch.’
If you only pay people minimum wage, they are only going to do the minimum for that wage.
Though the less people are paid the less they can spend too.
With unemployment as the topic of minimum wage considerations, here is a side note. NOTICE: the unemployment rate of the USA is dropping, the minimum wage has not been decreased. So what gives? In the US, according to the wonderful government number schemes, you are not “unemployed” unless you are drawing “unemployment benefits”. Since those benefits are expiring, naturally you are going to see the reported unemployment rate go down, and of course next month there will be an increase in unemployment as fat men with red suits don’t have a position at the mall along with guys in brown shorts pushing hand carts full of packages.