Minimum wage hikes were followed by employment increases

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

An incredibly simplistic argument breaks out every time liberal groups push to raise the federal minimum wage. We’ll lose jobs, opponents say. No we won’t, supporters say.

There’s a large body of rigorous economic research devoted to that subject. It includes a lot of counter-factuals: If the wage hadn’t gone up, would the economy have created more jobs, and if so, how many? There are some studies that find higher minimum wages hamper job creation; a recent and comprehensive survey of studies, by economists Dale Belman and Paul Wolfson, finds no statistically significant effect on jobs from the relatively modest federal minimum wage hikes across American history.

Those nuances don’t come out often in political debates.

That’s why some researchers at the National Employment Law Project — which advocates in favor of raising the federal minimum — have produced possibly the most un-nuanced analysis of the effects of minimum wage hikes that you’ll ever see. Its researchers, Paul Sonn and Yannet Lathrop, went back and look at each of the 22 instances since 1938 in which the United States raised its federal minimum wage. They looked at what followed with employment overall, and what happened in the leisure/hospitality and retail sectors, where minimum-wage jobs are often concentrated.

They did not look at counter-factuals. They did not look at rates of change. They simply asked one question: One year after the wage went up, were there more jobs, or less?

They found that 68 percent of the time, total jobs went up across the economy. Retail jobs increased 73 percent of the time. Hospitality employment rose 82 percent of the time. The researchers say business cycles explain the instances when employment fell: Each of those times, they write, the economy had entered or just come out of a recession, or was about to enter one.

http://www.theheraldbusinessjournal.com/article/20160505/BIZ02/160509389/1086/Minimum-wage-hikes-were-followed-by-employment-increases#

[RDANGELO]

1. I have been saying that all along.

Raising the minimum wage at this time will increase jobs because you have more money staying in the hands of consumers in the communities and in the US, instead of the money going to overseas production.