Tyler Cowen does not think highly of a federal $15 minimum wage:
Do you think Puerto Rico should be a state? Should they have a $15 minimum wage too? Come on. Yes, it is easy enough to make an exception for them, and by the way the median manufacturing wage in Mississippi is below $15 as well. Rinse and repeat.
I am sorry to speak in such terms, but the reality is that an allied cabal of activists and left-wing economists have combined on social media to insist on a particular approach to minimum wage economics and to bully those who disagree.
Ask yourself a simple question: were any of them calling for a temporary two-year cut in the minimum wage for restaurants and small businesses during a devastating pandemic? If not, are they really carrying forward the banner of science?
As I’ve said I don’t believe that pressing for a $15 minimum wage is a serious policy. I think its real purpose is to punish Red States, much in the way that limiting the deductibility of state and local taxes punishes Blue States.
The policy that we really need is one that will generate a large number of jobs that are worth paying $15 or more an hour and that can be filled by ordinary Americans. Take a gander at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s monthly sitrep. The bulk of the jobs we’ve been creating for years have been minimum wage jobs and many of those have vanished during the business lockdowns. You may legislate a wage but you can’t make every job worth paying $15/hour.
I don’t view the vanishing of so many minimum wage jobs as a bad thing but I don’t see how it comports with imposing no limits on the number of people with limited English and few marketable (legal) skills.
Unless all the administration really cares about are sound bites, optics, and slogans for the next election cycle.
Then it comports.
The man is a career politician.