More wishful thinking on the left
Well before the preternaturally talented Lonzo Ball was taken with the second pick in the NBA draft last month, his loquacious father LaVar knew his son would end up playing for his hometown Los Angeles Lakers. “I’m going to speak it into existence,” Ball promised. (And against all odds, he happened to be right.)
The ability to simply speak things into existence in the face of all evidence seems also to be a common political strategy on the left. Take, for example, the Democrats’ indefatigable insistence on the economic benefits of increasing the minimum wage. Basic economics tells us that making employees more expensive leads to higher unemployment and reduced hours but progressives forge ahead, undaunted.
Perhaps now they’ll realize they should be far more daunted.
A recent study by the University of Washington found the City of Seattle’s recent move to increase its citywide minimum wage to $15 has been detrimental to the very workers it was trying to help. According to the report, commissioned by the city itself and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the wage increase (only to $13 per hour now, but scheduled to hit $15 in a few years) actually decreased worker earnings by around $125 a month.
The conservative reaction? “Yeah, we know.”
The news seemed to come as a shock to liberals, many of whom attacked the study’s methodology and conclusions. Seattle’s mayor even signed up for a new study from a team at the University of California-Berkeley that produced a study with results more to his liking.
This is entirely predictable, as the embarrassing results would undermine a core tenet of the left’s agenda. During the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton tied herself in knots explaining why she supported a $15 minimum wage. In April, Senators Bernie Sanders (IVt.) and Patty Murray (Dthat
Wash.) introduced a bill to jack up the federal minimum wage to $15, and other bastions of progressivism such as Seattle, Minneapolis, New York, Washington, D.C., and the State of California already have done so. (In November, Milwaukee County passed an ordinance requiring a $15 “living wage” by 2021, but it only applies to county workers and those who do business with county government.)
But the University of Washington study, while not yet peer reviewed, includes the most detailed data set yet provided to minimum wage researchers. And the overwhelming majority of studies that have been conducted do show that higher minimum wages slow economic growth and cost low-income workers jobs. (Not surprisingly, anyone who questions the “scientific consensus” on climate change is labeled as a “denier,” while those who ignore a similar consensus by economists on the minimum wage are simply seeking “economic justice.”)
In this tradition, the Washington study tells us that once Seattle’s minimum wage moved to $13 in 2016, the city lost 5,000 low-skilled workers, a reduction of 6.8%. Workers making less than $19 an hour lost nearly 3.5 million in work hours, a drop of 9.4%.
The study suggests that when the higher minimum wage hit, businesses would replace more lower-earning employees with fewer higher-earning
ones to try to maximize productivity. This is in line with what we already knew — that minimum wage hikes are most detrimental to workers who are young, minority and low-income.
Of course, none of this will affect progressive organized labor enthusiasts, who will continue to try to get theirs at the expense of other workers and the economy in general. They will ignore the fact that businesses that run on thin profit margins aren’t piggy banks, and doubling their labor costs will throw people out into the street. They will keep holding rallies at which they will insist on speaking the benefits of minimum wage hikes into existence.
And when those rallies are over and they’re feeling hungry, they can speak their order at McDonald’s into a robot.