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New study: in 2017, minimum wage increases will cost 383,000 low income jobs

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I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery
I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery

Is raising the minimum wage a good idea? Where would the money come from for the higher wages? Would job creators be able to afford to pay people more for the same level of productivity?

Investors Business Daily discusses a new study about the minimum wage increases that will take effect in 2017:

One of the most vexing economic issues today is the minimum wage. For many, the failure to raise the minimum wage to $15 or higher is a sign of our nation’s stinginess and an essential part of the fight for income equality. However, the truth, sad to say, is quite different, as a new study shows.

The study by the American Action Forum, a nonpartisan think tank led by former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, looked at minimum-wage hikes scheduled to take effect in the coming years in 14 states and the nation’s capital and found they will “cost millions of jobs across the country and each lost job only leads to total wage earnings rising by a few thousand dollars.”

The reason is simple: When you raise the minimum wage of low-skilled, low-productivity labor — a group that disproportionately includes young minority males — you inevitably destroy jobs. No business will hire someone and pay him more than he’s worth.

So all those states might think they’re helping the downtrodden and the poor, and striking a blow for equality by mandating higher wages, but they’re doing just the opposite: Pricing many young people out of entry-level jobs.

The study estimates that minimum-wage hikes in just 2017 will kill off 383,000 low-end jobs. When phased in over a series of years, the losses become truly big: 2.6 million jobs. But wait, won’t the minimum-wage hike at least boost incomes?

Yes, but not much. For each job lost, earnings for the employees affected by the increase would go up just $6,900.

“While proposals to raise the minimum wage are well intended, it is important to consider the negative labor market consequences,” the report said. “A 10% increase in the real minimum wage is associated with a 0.3 to 0.5 percentage-point decline in the net job rate.”

What will happen when all of these young workers come out of high school and cannot find entry level jobs? Answer: they will have to get money through crime or black market or by collecting welfare. That’s how you earn money if you can’t get employment through legal means.

If we left the minimum wage low, they would be able to find entry level jobs and move up the ladder, perhaps by taking classes at night, like my parents did. My Dad was able to earn his Bachelor’s degree by working in a flower shop and as a security guard for minimal pay. Then he was able to find full-time work that allowed him to have another child, i.e. – me. My parents married first, got jobs, then had children later. But they relied on the availability of entry level jobs in order to work that plan through.

It’s very important to understand that not everyone who INTENDS to help the poor really ACHIEVES helping the poor. I really hope that Americans start to understand from disasters like Obamacare that you cannot let economic illiterates drive policy decisions. No matter how good the happy-talk sounds when read off of a teleprompter, there is no getting around the laws of economics.

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Watch Ted Cruz debate Bernie Sanders on health care policy and repealing Obamacare

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This debate happened on CNN earlier in the week. Thankfully, I was out traveling, so I actually had a TV to watch this in my hotel room.

Here is the full video:

It’s 90 minutes long. No commercials. This was basically a debate of similar substance to the William Lane Craig debates, where actual economic evidence was continuously produced in order to show who was telling the truth, and who was just trying to be popular by saying what people who are uneducated at economics want to hear. In short: there was a clear winner and loser in this debate, and it was clear all the way through, and was reinforced over and over every time evidence was produced. The person producing the evidence would turn his back on the camera, and return to his podium to get the evidence. That person won the debate by being grounded in reality.

Also, the questions were excellent, especially from the small business owners who were impacted by Obamacare. The moderators were biased towards Sanders, but not excessively.

For those who cannot watch, there is an article at the Daily Signal.

Full text:

In a prime-time debate on CNN this week, Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, discussed “The Future of Obamacare” in America. Cruz, a leading critic of the law, used the moment to outline the law’s failures.

Here are four things Cruz said about Obamacare:

1) “Now, nobody thinks we’re done once Obamacare is repealed. Once Obamacare is repealed, we need commonsense reform that increases competition, that empowers patients, that gives you more choices, that puts you in charge of your health care, rather than empowering government bureaucrats to get in the way. And these have been commonsense ideas.”

2) “Indeed, I don’t know if the cameras can see this, but in 70 percent of the counties in America, on Obamacare exchanges, you have a choice of one or two health insurance plans, that’s it … It’s interesting. You look at this map, this also very much looks like the electoral map that elected Donald Trump. It’s really quite striking that the communities that have been hammered by this disaster of a law said enough already.”

During one of the more powerful moments in the debate, Cruz held up aHeritage Foundation chart showing viewers how many counties in the U.S. have access to only one or two insurers under Obamacare. Additionally, only 11 percent of counties have access to four or more insurance providers.

3) “Whenever you put government in charge of health care, what it means is they ration. They decide you get care and you don’t. I don’t think the government has any business telling you you’re not entitled to receive health care.”

The U.S. should not envy other health care systems, especially Canada and the United Kingdom, Cruz said. He referred to a governor from Canada who came to the U.S. specifically to have heart surgery.

4) “That’s why I think the answer is not more of Obamacare, more government control, more of what got us in this mess. Rather, the answer is empower you. Give you choices. Lower prices. Lower premiums. Lower deductibles. Empower you and put you back in charge of your health care.”

Obamacare is burdening Americans. The average deductible for a family on a bronze plan is $12,393, according to a HealthPocket analysis. According to aneHealth report, the average nationwide premium increase for individuals is 99 percent and 140 percent for families from 2013-2017.

I really recommend you watch this debate, because it these things were done on a weekly or monthly basis, then people would be able to think critically about what they are presented with from the mainstream media, Hollywood elites and liberal academics.

Polemics

Thomas Sowell: does affirmative action help minorities to get ahead?

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Economist Thomas Sowell
Economist Thomas Sowell – the best economist in the world

My favorite economist, Thomas Sowell has an article in Investors Business Daily that explains what affirmative action really does to minorities.

Excerpt:

Affirmative action is supposed to benefit black and other minority students admitted with lower academic qualifications than some white students who are rejected.

[…]Despite much media spin, the issue is not whether blacks in general should be admitted to higher-ranked or lower-ranked institutions.

The issue is whether a given black student, with given academic qualifications, should be admitted to a college or university where he would not be admitted if he were white.

Much research over the years has confirmed… that admitting black students to institutions for which their academic preparation is not sufficient can be making them worse off instead of better off.

I became painfully aware of this problem more than 40 years ago when I was teaching at Cornell University and discovered that half the black students there were on some form of academic probation.

These students were not stupid or uneducable. On the contrary, the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile on scholastic tests. Their academic qualifications were better than those of three-quarters of all American students who took those tests.

Why were they in trouble at Cornell, then? Because the average Cornell student in the liberal arts college at that time scored at the 99th percentile. The classes taught there — including mine — moved at a speed geared to the verbal and mathematical level of the top one percent of American students.

The average white student would have been wiped out at Cornell. But the average white student was unlikely to be admitted to Cornell in the first place. Nor was a white student who scored at the 75th percentile.

That was a “favor” reserved for black students. This “favor” turned black students who would have been successful at most American colleges and universities into failures at Cornell.

None of this was peculiar to Cornell. Black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math had serious problems trying to keep up at MIT, where other students scored somewhere within the top 99th percentile.

Nearly one-fourth of these black students with stellar qualifications in math failed to graduate from MIT, and those who did graduate were concentrated in the bottom tenth of the class.

There were other fine engineering schools around the country where those same students could have learned more, when taught at a normal pace, than at a breakneck speed geared to students with extremely rare abilities in math.

[…]Mismatching students with educational institutions is a formula for needless failures.

The book “Mismatch” by Sander and Taylor is a first-rate study of the hard facts. It shows, for example, that the academic performances of black and Hispanic students rose substantially after affirmative action admissions policies were banned in the University of California system.

Instead of failing at Berkeley or UCLA, these minority students were now graduating from other UC campuses. They were graduating at a higher rate, with higher grades, and now more often in challenging fields like math, science and technology.

[…]Does the actual fate of minority students not matter to the left as much as their symbolic presence on a campus?

Now, you might ask yourself on what basis Sowell makes all these assertions, so here are a few of his academic publications about affirmative action, which are state-of-the-art:

Now, I was recently talking to a friend who has empirically false views on a number of topics. He is opposed to capital punishment, opposed to gun ownership, supports affirmative action, and so on. When I ask him why he believes these things, he doesn’t point to any evidence. I offered to give him studies showing that capital punishment has a deterrent effect on crime, that concealed carry laws reduce violent crime rates, that affirmative action laws harm minorities, etc.

If we really want to help minorities, we have to do what makes sense according the evidence. We have to aim to do good, not just feel good.