This really is a terrible article....
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Well, trickle-downers, look at the data here: The two cities in the nation with the highest rate of job growth by small businesses are San Francisco and Seattle. Guess which cities have the highest minimum wage? San Francisco and Seattle. The fastest-growing big city in America? Seattle. Fifteen dollars isn’t a risky untried policy for us. It’s doubling down on the strategy that’s already allowing our city to kick your city’s ass
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Well, yeah and Seattle and San Francisco are among the US cities with the highest cost of living. It's not like Tupelo is paying their wait staff $15 an hour any time soon.
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"Is this issue more complicated than I’m making out? Of course. Are there many factors at play determining the dynamics of employment? Yup. But please, please stop insisting that if we pay low-wage workers more, unemployment will skyrocket and it will destroy the economy."
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The really stupid thing is that on one hand, he has all the evidence he needs to draw conclusions on his side (15$ minimum wage is good), and on the other hand, there is not enough evidence to draw any different conclusion (15$ minimum wage is bad). It's the same bloody evidence. Brutal logic.
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The standard response in the minimum-wage debate, made by Republicans and their business backers and plenty of Democrats as well, is that raising the minimum wage costs jobs. Businesses will have to lay off workers. This argument reflects the orthodox economics that most people had in college. If you took Econ 101, then you literally were taught that if wages go up, employment must go down
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Obviously he thinks the standard logic is wrong....
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I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong
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What the guy doesn't recognize is that all of the data concerning minimum wage increases uses 7-12% wage increases. Not 50% increases as are proposed in Seattle and Alberta. That's a huge difference. So when he says his city is kicking ass, he didn't even realized that the ass kicking contest hadn't even started at he time he wrote the article.
And he's just fundamentally wrong anyway. Walmart recently raised it's minimum wage to $9 and is now cutting hours to maintain profit....
http://www.thestar.com/business/2015...sts-costs.html
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Walmart Stores Inc., in the midst of spending $1 billion (U.S.) to raise employees’ wages and give them extra training, has been cutting the number of hours some of them work in a bid to keep costs in check
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I'm now almost 100% sure that raising corporate tax AND mucking with royalty rates with low oil prices AND forecasting a recession AND running a 6 billion dollar deficit will make raising the minimum wage by 50% one of the stupidest ideas to ever appear in public policy.