"The minimum wage is something that F.D.R. put in place a long time ago during the Great Depression. I don't think it worked then. It didn't solve any problems then and it hasn't solved any problems in 50 years."
-- John Raese
For many years it has been a matter of conventional wisdom among economists that the minimum wage causes fewer jobs to exist than would be the case without it. This is simply a matter of price theory, taught in every economics textbook, requiring no elaborate analysis to justify. Were this not the case, there would be no logical reason why the minimum wage could not be set at $10, $100, or $1 million per hour.
Historically, defenders of the minimum wage have not disputed the dis-employment effects of the minimum wage, but argued that on balance the working poor were better off. In other words, the higher incomes of those with jobs offset the lower incomes of those without jobs, as a result of the minimum wage l "levitan".
Now, President Obama is advancing the novel economic theory that modest increases in the minimum wage will have no impact whatsoever on employment. This proposition is based entirely on the work of three economists: David Card and Alan Krueger of Princeton, and Lawrence Katz of Harvard. Their studies of increases in the minimum wage in California, Texas and New Jersey apparently found no loss of jobs among fast food restaurants that were surveyed before and after the increase [ l "card-92b", l "krueger", and l "katz".
While it is not yet clear why Card, Katz and Krueger got the results that they did, it is clear that their findings are directly contrary to virtually every empirical study ever done on the minimum wage. These studies were exhaustively surveyed by the Minimum Wage Study Commission, which concluded that a 10% increase in the minimum wage reduced teenage employment by 1% to 3%.
The following survey of the academic research on the minimum wage is designed to give nonspecialists a sense of just how isolated the Card, Krueger and Katz studies are. It will also indicate that the minimum wage has wide-ranging negative effects that go beyond unemployment. For example, higher minimum wages encourage employers to cut back on training, thus depriving low wage workers of an important means of long-term advancement, in return for a small increase in current income. For many workers this is a very ...
... middle of paper ...
...g (1996), " `Who Gets What' from Minimum Wage Hikes," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 49 (April): 547-52.
· ------, and T. A. Finegan (1989), "The Minimum Wage and the Poor: The End of a Relationship," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 8 (Winter): 53-71.
23w
· Card, D., and A. Krueger (1995), Myth and Measurement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press).
· Deere, D., K. M. Murphy and F. Welch (1995), "Employment and the 1990-1991 Minimum Wage Hike," American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 85 (May): 232-37.
· Gramlich, E. (1976), "Impact of Minimum Wages on Other Wages, Employment, and Family Incomes," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2: 409-51.
· Lang, K. (1994), "The Effect of Minimum Wage Laws on the Distribution of Employment: Theory and Evidence," Working Paper, Boston University.
· Neumark, D., and W. Wascher (1995), "The Effects of Minimum Wages on Teenage Employment and Enrollment: Evidence from Matched CPS Surveys," NBER Working Paper No. 5092, April.
· Smith, R., and B. Vavrichek (1992), "The Wage Mobility of Minimum Wage Workers," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 46 (October): 82-88.
The minimum wage was, as it should be, a living wage, for working men and women ... who are attempting to provide for their families, feed and clothe their children, heat their homes, [and] pay their mortgages. The cost-of-living inflation adjustment since 1981 would put the minimum wage at $4.79 today, instead of the $4.25 it will reach on April 1, 1991. That is a measure of how far we have failed the test of fairness to the working poor.” (Burkhauser 1)
Understanding how the minimum wage level functions to affect poverty in a given society is crucial for informing policy in a number of important areas. Indeed, examining the link between poverty and the minimum wage is necessary for policy-makers working to establish sound economic policy as well as labour and social advocacy groups seeking to ensure the minimum wage is at a level sufficient to ensure workers can meet their most basic and fundamental needs. Readers should be concerned with the link between the minimum wage and levels of poverty because poverty is a particularly significant and impactful social issue. High rates of poverty can both negatively impact the economy, as well as contribute to a host of negative social issues. At the same time, there may be questions regarding the impacts to poverty associated with the minimum wage. Research which better clarifies this link is particularly important. For these reasons, investigating the link between the minimum wage and poverty is essential. This essay will provide a summary of two academic journal articles investigating the link between poverty and the minimum wage. Each summary will discuss the particular focus of researchers, the contribution of the study, the methodology employed by researchers, as well as their findings and conclusions. Finally, the essay will conclude with a brief commentary regarding the relevance of these articles to the larger topic, as well as their effectiveness in promoting learning.
“ When art is true, it is one with nature. This is the secret of primitive art and also of the art of the masters—Michelangelo, Cézanne, Seurat, and Renoir. The secret of my best work is that it is Mexican." A leader and one of the founding members of the Mexican Muralist movement, Diego Rivera, was said to be the greatest Mexican painter during the 1920s. Rivera used his talents as a painter to tell the history and daily life of the Mexican people from its Mayan beginnings up to the Mexican Revolution.
Currently, in the United States, the federal minimum wage has been $7.25 for the past six years; however, in 1938 when it first became a law, it was only $0.25. In the United States the federal minimum wage has been raised 22 times since 1938 by a significant amount due to changes in the economy. Minimum wage was created to help America in poverty and consumer power purchasing, but studies have shown that minimum wage increases do not reduce poverty. By increasing the minimum wage, it “will lift some families out of poverty, while other low-skilled workers may lose their jobs, which reduces their income and drops their families into poverty” (Wilson 4). When increasing minimum wage low-skilled, workers living in poor families,
The minimum wage has been a policy tool used in the United States since its establishment with the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. It has been uses as a tool to remedy some of the effects of poverty by raising the wages of the low wage workers. It has long been the worthy goal of many policy makers to find solutions to alleviate pove...
Physicalism is a substudy of philosophy that is ripe for debate. Generally, it is divided by two opposing groups of belief; traditional physicalism, which serves to explain the world in purely physical terms, and anti-physicalism (dualism), which asserts a certain duality and lack of physicality within certain mental states and properties. To be physical, in this context, is entirely dependent on the school of thought accompanied by the person considering it. The dualist claim is that the world cannot be fully explained in purely physical terms, rather, that it needs to be explained in distinct states, both physical and mental. In the dualist sense, the term “physical” describes all properties and states that aren’t mental or phenomenological.
Sherk, James. "What Is Minimum Wage: Its History and Effects on the Economy." The Heritage
Linda Gorman. "Minimum Wages." The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. 2008. Library of Economics and Liberty. Retrieved April 24, 2014 from the World Wide Web: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/MinimumWages.html
Many people against raising the minimum wage create arguments such as, “it will cause inflation”, or, “ it will result in job loss.” Not only are these arguments terribly untrue, they also cause a sense of panic towards the majority working-class. Since 1938, the federal minimum wage has been increased 22 times. For more than 75 years, real GDP per capita has consistently increased, even when the wage has been
Armstrong, Ari “Minimum Wage Laws: Economically Harmful Because Immoral,” The Objective Standard. 7 March 2013.
Meer, Jonathan, and Jeremy West. “Effects Of The Minimum Wage On Employment Dynamics.” (2013): EconLit. Web 24 Oct. 2013.
William Lester, and Michael Reich in 2010. Their study, which is titled, “Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders Estimates Using Contiguous Counties” was published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, in November 2010. Dube, Lester, and Reich’s study is also cited by John Schmitt as one of the most “important and influential papers written on the minimum wage in the last decade.” According to Schmitt, this is because Dube, Lester and Reich offer a “comprehensive reappraisal of both the new minimum wage research and its critics. The study was built around a key methodological innovation which essentially generalized Card and Krueger's New Jersey study to make it nationally representative, and identified a significant weakness in much of the earlier minimum-wage research based on the analysis of state employment patterns, which had failed to control for regional differences in employment growth that were unrelated to the minimum wage.” As aforementioned, one of the biggest critiques against David Card and Alan Krueger’s study over four hundred and ten
The first that it is crazy. On the surface panpsychism goes against common sense. As Goff stated in his research paper titled, Panpsychism, panpsychists often receive incredulous looks of disbelief when they bring up the idea that electrons have consciousness (Goff 6-7). The idea that panpsychism should be dismissed just because it seems to go against common sense is just unfair. There is a long history of scientific theories being ‘crazy.’ Take for example Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. This was a preposterous idea that went against common sense, but through the years we have come to accept it. The same can be said for the idea that the earth is round, when it was previously thought to be
Agree to the criteria in advance of evaluating options: negotiators should agree to the criteria for evaluating potential integrative solutions early in the process.
Bernstein, Jared. “Would Raising the Minimum Wage Harm the Economy?” The CQ Researcher 16 Dec. 2005:1069.