Democrats are moving fast to advance some of their biggest policy goals under the guise of COVID-19 relief. One of their most contentious proposals is to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, with the phase-in beginning this year.
That is an exceedingly risky idea. It could reduce employment by more than a million jobs. And the effects would reverberate well beyond the employment impact, because minimum-wage hikes have a variety of convoluted, poorly understood, and unpredictable knock-on effects. If we want higher wages at the bottom of the labor market, there are better ways to create them.
Let’s …
Something to Consider
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