Minimum Wage

July 22, 2019

Bernie Sanders’s workers wanted $15 an hour—so he cut their hours

On Friday I mentioned the ongoing labor dispute between the workers and management of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. The longtime advocate of raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour is finding that it’s easy to complain about greedy employers until you become the one having to make payroll. Continue Reading...

July 19, 2019

Bernie Sanders cares more about unions than he does his own workers

Who would have predicted that the hottest labor dispute of the summer would be between the workers and management of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign? Sanders is a long-time champion of raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour, so his campaign workers assumed they’d earn that level of pay too: Campaign field hires have demanded an annual salary they say would be equivalent to a $15-an-hour wage, which Sanders for years has said should be the federal minimum. Continue Reading...

July 12, 2019

Can summer jobs reduce violent crime?

Several decades of social science has shown a correlation between joblessness among disadvantaged youth and violent crime. While remediation has not been shown to lead to prevention, there is some evidence that summer jobs can. Continue Reading...

July 10, 2019

Democrats propose to eliminate over a million jobs held by the working poor

The Democratic presidential candidates are in agreement on a proposal to eliminate 1.3 million jobs nationwide. That’s not the way they would frame the issue, of course. Saying that you will eliminate over a million jobs held by the poorest people in America is not exactly a winning message. Continue Reading...

April 03, 2019

How the minimum wage affected workers during (and after) the Great Recession

The law of demand is one of the most fundamental concepts of economics. This law states that, if all other factors remain equal, the higher the price of a good, the less people will demand that good. Continue Reading...

March 18, 2019

Economists agree: Don’t raise the minimum wage to $15

When it comes to policy choices, professional economists are famous for being overly circumspect. President Harry Truman once complained, “Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, ‘on one hand . Continue Reading...

February 21, 2019

Why the minimum wage shouldn’t be a family wage

Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and one that seems to a have particular potent effect on politicians. Consider, for example, a recent tweet by Massachusetts’s senator and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. Continue Reading...