The Golden State has long prided itself on being a global leader in protecting employees and the environment, but new evidence suggests the state’s “progress” on the employment side is hurting its environmental goals. California’s minimum wage is rising rapidly toward $15, and the wage floor has already surpassed that level in a number of cities. The consequences for small businesses with narrow margins (and the […]

House ”Blue Dog” Democrats position themselves as a voice of reason, promising “commonsense” alternatives to the party’s more progressive members. But if Blue Dogs cave in and support a $15 federal minimum wage that will eliminate up to 3.7 million jobs, it suggests the coalition’s promise is more rhetoric than reality. After Democrats re-took control of the House in 2018, Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) said a $15 minimum wage […]

This is one political promise it’s OK to break. Democrats pledged a $15-an-hour minimum wage while campaigning in 2018, and all but three of the party’s 2020 presidential candidates endorse the increase. But a new report from the Congressional Budget Office finds the policy could leave nearly four million workers without a job. This week’s analysis is an update of CBO’s 2014 analysis of a $10.10 minimum wage, […]

According to an old saying, if you ask five economists for advice you’ll get five different answers. But when it comes to a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage, economists are in near-universal agreement: it’s a bad idea. That's the conclusion of a new survey conducted by CorCom Inc., the company I head. The survey was released this week by the Employment Policies Institute. The survey coincides with the push […]

One of the Democrats' top priorities in the new Congress is a $15 minimum wage — a 107-percent increase over the current standard. Before embracing a federal wage mandate for which there's no historical precedent, party leaders should take a lesson from former President Bill Clinton. Clinton was a champion of a higher minimum wage, and in 1996 he signed into law a 21-percent federal wage hike. (In […]

Has New York’s minimum wage experiment been a success or failure? For Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the verdict is all positive. He described the state’s minimum wage—which in New York City rose to $15 an hour Dec. 31—as a “national example in the fight for economic justice.” But employment figures paint a less-rosy picture. New York has more than a dozen different minimum wage rates depending on a business’s […]