The new California minimum wage for fast food workers of$ 20 per hour became effective on April 1. In signing the act, California Gov. A 25 % above the state’s current minimum wage, according to Gavin Newsom, would hurt teenagers who disproportionately benefit from fast-food work and who are subsequently enticed by this as their entrance into the workforce.
Newsom said:” That’s a romanticized version of a world that does n’t exist. We have the opportunity to praise that commitment, reward that compromise and maintain an industry”.
In 2019, The New York Times editorial table echoed the concept:
In the 1980s, this newspaper committee came out against the national least, calling it” an idea whose time has passed,” and citing as information” a virtual compromise among economists.” The simplistic view that minimum-wage laws caused unemployment commanded for a broad consensus in the 1980s. The restaurant business and other major employers of low-wage workers continue to raise the ancient criticism on a regular basis.
A pioneering study conducted by economists David Card and Alan Krueger in 1993 compared fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and a nearby area of Pennsylvania to assess the minimum wage increase. It found no impact on employment.
The editorial board of the 2019 New York Times has made a 180-degree change from what its board of directors wrote in a 1987 mind part with the headline” The Right Minimum Wage:$ 0.00″:
[ T] here’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is a concept that has since passed. Working poor persons would be trampled out of the workforce if the minimum wage was raised significantly.
A higher minimal had certainly enable the majority of low-wage workers to maintain their employment. That get, it is argued, would defend the sacrifice of the majority who became unskilled. The reasoning is n’t encouraging. Young, bad workers, who now face enormous obstacles to getting and keeping jobs, are the ones who are most at risk from a higher minimal.
In a 1973 meeting, Nobel laureate in economics Milton Friedman said”, I’ve frequently said the minimum- pay rate is the most anti- Negro law on the books.”
Today, the “avant-garde”” Card- Nightmare study” mentioned in the New York Times 2019 editor did, in fact, contradict the consensus among economists that government-imposed minimum wage increases increase unemployment and raise prices and give an additional incentive to reduce labor costs through automation.
But about the investigation, The New York Times ‘ personal blogger, economist and Nobel success Paul Krugman, wrote:
However, much- cited studies by two nicely- regarded labor economists, David Card and Alan Krueger, find that where there have been more or less controlled experiments, for example, when New Jersey raised minimum wages, but Pennsylvania did no, the effects of the increase on employment have been negligible or perhaps positive.
There is much disagreement over what to make of this outcome. Card and Krueger offered some complex theoretical rationales, but most of their colleagues are unconvinced, the centrist view is probably that minimum wages ‘ do,’ in fact, reduce employment.
Krugman is now in favor of a minimum wage.
Other economists criticized the “breaking study,” noting that the study’s authors simply asked employers to hire more or fewer workers following the minimum-wage increase. However, when the same employers were asked to provide payroll records, it turned out that the state with the higher minimum wage saw a decline in employment compared to the state with the lowest minimum wage. This confirmed the general consensus that the so-called unskilled are the most at risk, and that many of these would-be workers are the same black and brown liberals who The New York Times editorial board claims to care about.
Lowell Galloway, an economist at Ohio University, examined the study and refrained from publishing it:
The Card- Krueger study is still cited because it is useful politically. Because the idea of a minimum wage is a concept that simply wo n’t die, it still has a life. You cannot discredit it by any amount of proof that it has problems. Any study that supports a belief, regardless of how weak it is, will be accepted whenever people want to believe something strongly enough.
But that’s about Newsom and The New York Times.
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