Can someone answer my question about the minimum-wage hike?

[pnwmom]

74. You are asking the right questions, and that is why Obama, most Democratic Congress members,

and top economists support a $12 minimum wage, not $15.

The Princeton professor who did most of the research showing that raising the minimum will NOT cause job loss says his data only supports a rise to $12 -- after that, it might cause job losses.

He also says that individual cities and states could do well with a $15 minimum, but overall, the data supports a Federal minimum of about $12.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-minimum-wage-how-much-is-too-much.html

When I started studying the minimum wage 25 years ago, like most economists at that time I expected that the wage floor reduced employment for some groups of workers. But research that I and others have conducted convinced me that if the minimum wage is set at a moderate level it does not necessarily reduce employment. While some employers cut jobs in response to a minimum-wage increase, others find that a higher wage floor enables them to fill their vacancies and reduce turnover, which raises employment, even though it eats into their profits. The net effect of all this, as has been found in most studies of the minimum wage over the last quarter-century, is that when it is set at a moderate level, the minimum wage has little or no effect on employment.


For example, David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, and I found that when New Jersey raised its minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.05 an hour in 1992 (or from about $7.25 to $8.60 in today’s dollars), job growth at fast-food restaurants in the state was just as strong as it was at restaurants across the border in Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage remained $4.25 an hour. Equally important — but less well known — within New Jersey, job growth was just as strong at low-wage restaurants that were constrained by the law to raise pay as it was at higher-wage restaurants that were not directly affected by the increase since their workers already earned more than the new minimum.

I am frequently asked, “How high can the minimum wage go without jeopardizing employment of low-wage workers? And at what level would further minimum wage increases result in more job losses than wage gains, lowering the earnings of low-wage workers as a whole?”

Although available research cannot precisely answer these questions, I am confident that a federal minimum wage that rises to around $12 an hour over the next five years or so would not have a meaningful negative effect on United States employment. One reason for this judgment is that around 140 research projects commissioned by Britain’s independent Low Pay Commission have found that the minimum wage “has led to higher than average wage increases for the lowest paid, with little evidence of adverse effects on employment or the economy.” A $12-per-hour minimum wage in the United States phased in over several years would be in the same ballpark as Britain’s minimum wage today.

But $15 an hour is beyond international experience, and could well be counterproductive. Although some high-wage cities and states could probably absorb a $15-an-hour minimum wage with little or no job loss, it is far from clear that the same could be said for every state, city and town in the United States.