“the CBO estimates that raising the minimum wage would cost 1.4 million jobs, reducing total national employment by 0.9 percent in 2025, the first year in which the full $15 hourly wage would be in effect. Some people’s wages would increase, lifting about 0.9 million people out of poverty in the process; the evidence suggests these higher wages would be largely paid for by consumers in the form of higher prices. The knock-on effects to employment, taxation, and various federal programs would raise the deficit by about $54 billion over the next decade.”
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“You can always argue with the CBO’s estimates and models, and at times it’s been quite wrong. But it’s fairly obvious that substantially raising federal wage requirements would result in some number of employers choosing to employ fewer people, especially in rural areas with lower costs of living where employers are likely to be more sensitive to increased labor costs.”
Making Sense of the Minimum Wage: A Roadmap for Navigating Recent Research Jeffrey Clemens. 5 14 2019. CATO Institute. https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/making-sense-minimum-wage-roadmap-navigating-recent-research Gradually raising the minimum wage to $15 would be good for workers, good for businesses, and good for the economy Ben Zipperer. 2
“House and Senate Democrats on Tuesday reintroduced a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, more than doubling the current $7.25 hourly rate.
The House reportedly plans to include the measure in its upcoming COVID-19 relief legislation. The main problem: That would provide the polar opposite of relief to businesses buckling under the weight of COVID-19 and the associated government lockdowns.
As has been the case over the past year, the congressional aid package is, in part, supposed to resuscitate livelihoods decimated by state-required closures and restrictions. It’s richly ironic that a heightened minimum wage would be yet another mandate that business-owners might need help counteracting. Relief from the relief.”
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“The Democrats’ measure is unlikely to pass in conventional fashion, as it would require the votes of at least 10 Senate Republicans to overcome the filibuster. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) said instead that they will pursue a backroad and seek to make it law via budget reconciliation, though the restrictions on that process make success there unlikely as well.
Sanders is undeterred. “Let’s be clear. The $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage is a starvation wage,” he said in a statement. “No person in America can make it on $8, $10, or $12 an hour.” There are a few problems there. The foremost: It’s even harder to make it on $0 an hour.”
“Florida voters have said yes to increasing the state’s minimum wage to $15.
They did so by approving Amendment 2, which increases the state’s minimum wage from $8.56 to $15 by September 30, 2026, according to the New York Times and the Associated Press. The change is incremental, with employers being asked to increase wages, essentially, by $1 a year. The amendment also specifies that as of September 30, 2027, Florida must adjust its state minimum wage based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), meaning wages will be adjusted up or down as consumer prices change. The same measure is used to calculate changes in Social Security benefits.”
“The newest of the papers, authored by John Kaufman, Leslie Salas-Hernández, Kelli Komro, and Melvin Livingston in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, examined monthly data across the US from 1990 to 2015 and estimated that a $1 increase in the minimum wage led to a 3.4 to 5.9 percent decline in suicides among adults with a high school education or less. The authors also estimated that over the 26-year period, a $1 increase in each state’s minimum wage could have prevented 27,550 suicide deaths, or about 1,059 per year.
The paper has created a bit of a stir. But it’s just one of four studies in the past couple of years to find an association between higher minimum wages and lower death rates (specifically suicides).
If these findings hold up in subsequent research, they provide a new, persuasive rationale for raising the minimum wage.”