The editors of the Wall Street Journal are quick to point out that raising New York’s minimum wage to $15 is producing precisely the results that many of us predicted:
Is it merely a coincidence that the city’s full-service restaurants have fallen into a jobs recession? Employment in January dropped 3.7% year over year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the start of 2018, the Big Apple’s sit-down restaurants had 167,900 employees. This January, after the wage bump, it fell to 161,700, a three-year low. The preliminary February number is 161,000, even as overall city employment is up around 2% year over year.
The monthly jobs data can be noisy, but the trend fits what restaurateurs are saying. The New York City Hospitality Alliance surveyed 324 full-service eateries late last year. Nearly half, 47%, planned to eliminate jobs in 2019 to deal with higher labor costs. Three-fourths expected to cut employee hours, and 87% said they would raise menu prices.
Meanwhile, in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper posted last month, three economists examined whether minimum-wage increases had any effect on crime from 1998 to 2016. “We find robust evidence,†they write, “that minimum wage hikes increase property crime arrests among teenagers and young adults ages 16-to-24, a population for whom minimum wages are likely to bind.â€
Those hurt the most by these developments are young black men. The unemployment rate among young black men is almost 17% while their labor force participation rate is 57%, higher and lower, respectively, than other young people and much higher and lower, respectively, than the population as a whole.
Education is no solution to this problem—we aren’t creating enough jobs that require college degrees, either. Being unemployed with educational debt not dischargeable in bankruptcy is worse than just being unemployed.
Lot of them are killers, and that scares people, that’s not hate, it’s fear.
If you meant about the minimum wage, that’s always been about votes.