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States That Raised Minimum Wage See No Slow-Down In Job Growth

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Department of Labor has released data that some proponents of raising minimum wage are touting as evidence that higher minimum wage promotes job growth. While the data doesn't actually establish cause and effect, it does "run counter to a Congressional Budget Office report in February that said raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, as the White House supports, would cost 500,000 jobs." The data shows that the 13 states that raised their minimum wages in January added jobs at a faster rate than those that didn't. Other factors likely contributed to this outcome, but some economists are simply relieved that the higher wage factor didn't have a dramatically negative effect in general.

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  1. Re:Local testing works? by knightghost · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Show me an area with a high minimum wage and I'll show you an area with a large illegal labor force making less.

    I travel all around the country and that's a very constant result. If you want to increase wages then 1) invest in education, and 2) change Free Trade to Fair Trade.

  2. Re:Local testing works? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Allow me to take these blinders off of you and show you the entire industry that is hiring illegals to pick your produce. In fact, do a search for "H2 workers" and be amazed by the wonders of our legal system.

  3. Re:Crazy by roman_mir · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Maiming small children actually seems to be the business model that modern governments are in today, with all the wars, drones, bombings, wars on 'terrorism', etc. Free market capitalist system does not reward companies for maiming people, governments on the other hand force you to participate, if you do not like it, you can always opt out to go to jail for tax evasion.

    Setting up minimum wage destroys opportunities for people with no skill sets, that's all it does, it doesn't provide anybody with "decent living" and it shouldn't. Decent living is provided by better jobs, but you have to find those better jobs in the first place and if you can never get a job to improve your skills, a low wage paying job, you are much less likely to find the next job that actually pays much more than a minimum wage does anyway.

    You are getting the opposite effect, not a 'feel good' effect when you use government violence to impose your wrong-headed moral ideas.

  4. Re:Crazy by roman_mir · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    hogwash. It's a law. Laws are passed by elected representatives, which is the form that we, as society, have agreed upon. Saying "this wasn't society" is the same handwaving as saying "it wasn't me who pulled the trigger, officer, it was my finger".

    - unions pushed for this legislature, normal people did not need any of it. The democracy is broken specifically because it allows large organisations to destroy individual rights of people that are not organised that way, which is why those laws were passed though they benefited very few at the expense of many. These laws prevented people with a lower socio-economic status (at the time mostly non-whites) from competing with the union workers for the jobs.

    Union organisation is obviously there to represent the union, not anybody else, not employers and not people outside of the unions. Unions destroyed competition in the job market. You can yell 'hogwash' all you like, but the people who lost the jobs that unions were after actually didn't "pull that trigger" and it wasn't their "finger" either. The finger was given to them.

    Which is why it exists in a hundred other countries who don't have the US racism, yes? Try again, maybe with an argument that survives for three seconds.

    - actually USA was not the leader in this fight of the unions against disorganised minority labour. New Zealand introduced the first minimum wage laws, those were directed against the aboriginals competing for jobs with the whites. Then it was time for Australia.

    Once the precedent was established, the UK stepped into the action, realising that this was a powerful way to gain political support from the unions. USA tried this in 1912 first, then it was deemed unconstitutional, which it was! It was discriminatory and unconstitutional. In 1938 it was pushed through, as many other horrific things that were pushed through during the FDR, where the excuse was always 'Great Depression' (started as a bubble that was inflated by the Federal reserve buying bad UK debt from France and which became the depression during Hoover and FDR due to all of the government meddling and attempts to 'save' the economy from the much needed recession, which was realigning the mis-allocated resources).

    When you tell me to "try again", I will most certainly do and tell you exactly what is what, so that maybe you can pull your head out of you know where.

    If you don't like democracy, how about you say it outright?

    - maybe you should read my comments and my journal entries, I do not like democracy, I can appreciate the difference between a democracy and a republic, which USA was supposed to keep, but it didn't. Democracy is mobocracy which I specifically not only 'do not like', I abhor it. I completely disagree with allowing a majority to destroy rights of a minority, which is what democracy does, which is what destroys the economy when the majority (employees) are pitted against a minority (employers). Employees, business owners will never have the same number of votes allocated to them, so in a democracy first the individual rights of people in the minority are destroyed by the mob and the politicians, who are only too happy to oblige to stay in power and second the business owners then have no choice but to use whatever leverage they can to corrupt the system further by throwing money at it.

    If the democracy did not provide the politicians with the method of destroying the Constitutional rights of individuals then the business owners would not be able to use their money to buy any favours, because there would be no favours to sell. Government must not be able to pass business related and money related laws and thus destroy individual freedoms. Government must not be able to tax income, it must not be able to create any type of labour or business related regulations. Once it can do it, then favours for some can be bought at the expense of others. No, I do not li