Austin Glass
Sep 7, 2018 · 2 min read

Seems much less conclusive than what you want to believe. To say that we know increased minimum wage doesn’t negatively impact employment is clearly false. When deciding on a new hire(or even continued employment of current staff)businesses have to calculate benefit versus cost of said employment. If the cost is increased, but not the benefit are you more or less likely to make a hire? It isn’t more and it isn’t unchanged. If you have a study that says otherwise then you should question the legitimacy of your study.

Your claims in regards to the views of “supply siders” are off to an alarming degree. Alarming because the implication is that you either don’t understand their arguments at all or that you feel free to misrepresent them for whatever reason. I have never seen many of the arguments that you attribute to them. The general view in regards to minimum wage is that it is a benefit for those who keep their jobs. That minimum wage jobs are a tiny fraction of the overall jobs market and often make up entry level positions that are gateways to higher paying careers.

There are weaknesses in supply side arguments. That when you lower taxes on companies they don’t necessarily pass those tax breaks onto consumers or employees for instance. Which was the whole claim in regards to trickle down.

Though to me the better argument there is why don’t they? Usually it is a lack of a competitive marketplace. We have many industries that are regulated it seems for the express purpose of limiting competition. The government’s primary role in a marketplace should be to maintain competition, yet it usually does the opposite. The American model seems to be for a new industry to rise up only for those in said industry to pull the ladder that they climbed up behind them by way of regulations. That is part of the reason for the claims by social media companies that they can’t regulate themselves. Think about why they would want to government to step in to regulate them? Existing companies can pay for the costs of compliance. New rivals that may rise up in coming years to supplant them cannot.

Minimum wage is often viewed as forcing companies to pay more for labor. Which is only partly true. It also prevents people from accepting jobs below a certain threshold of pay. Why should we prevent someone working for $10/hour if they are willing to do so?

    Austin Glass

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