I miss the days when I could illustrate the absurdity of the minimum wage to my liberal friends by stretching it to extremes. If something like a $9 or $10 minimum wage is so great, why not $15 or $20 an hour in that case? The point of such a question was to get liberals to realize that there’s a point where even they would have to recognize that the minimum wage costs jobs – but nowadays, they’re more likely to take such a question as a policy suggestion.
A handful of cities have implemented their own $15 minimum wage ordinances, and just as a landmark study found that the higher wages “paradoxically” cost Seattle’s low-skilled workers money before they could even fully phase in their $15 minimum wage (it’s currently $13 an hour), Minneapolis decided to ignore reality entirely and give in to the Fight for Fifteen.
Minneapolis has just passed an ordinance making the minimum wage in that fine city $15 an hour at some point in the near future–the effects of this will be worse than the effects of the similar Seattle ordinance raising the minimum wage there to $15 an hour.
The Minneapolis City Council approved a $15 minimum wage Friday, a move years in the making that will affect hundreds of businesses and thousands of workers across the city.
The vote adds Minneapolis to a list of cities nationwide, including Seattle, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., that have approved similar measures in recent years.
“Today, we uplift all workers,” Council Member Abdi Warsame, who was absent from Friday’s meeting, said in a letter that was read aloud. “Today’s vote, while historic, is just another step in our unending journey to build a better city.”
H/T Forbes
Well, get ready for a heck of a lot of people to be put out of work, because as economist Mark Perry has noted, a minimum wage hike to $9.50 was enough to cost Minneapolis tens of thousands of food service jobs.
What was Mpls. city council thinking? Twin Cities area is already losing food jobs (-3,000) since state min wage went to $9.50. Imagine $15 pic.twitter.com/RbmCSOFYNi
— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) June 30, 2017
Who even wants to imagine what a 50% increase in the minimum wage from will do to them? Given that the cost of living is greater in Seattle than in Minneapolis, the “real” value of a $15 minimum wage is higher in Minneapolis, and thus the consequences will be more pronounced.
For a very comprehensive overview of the “cruelty of the $15 minimum wage,” consider watching the following report from ReasonTV.
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