Twenty-one states and Washington, D.C., will raise their minimum wage this year, under the misbegotten notion that it will help the poor, in particular struggling minority youth. It won't.
As a new study from the American Action Forum shows, not only will most workers not be better off, they will take a huge hit.
Why? Common sense tells you that when you raise the cost of something, anything, less of it will be used or consumed. It's a fundamental precept of economics. And labor is no different.
Coercive minimum-wage hikes this year, the AAF estimates, will kill 261,000 jobs held mostly by poor, undertrained, undereducated, young suburban millennials and minority teens.
But it's even worse than that: Once the minimum-wage increases are fully phased in, some 1.7 million jobs will be lost. As the Daily Caller helpfully notes, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated last year that the U.S. economy will add 11.5 million jobs over the next 10 years. So that's roughly 15% of a decade's worth of jobs destroyed.
Investors Business Daily
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