On Wednesday, Labor Secretary Perez was asked by a reporter about a study done by the American Enterprise Institute on the District of Columbia’s minimum wage hike. D.C. raised its minimum wage to $10.50 an hour last July. According to AEI, following the mandatory wage increase, D.C. saw the loss of 1,400 jobs in the restaurant industry in six months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This was the biggest loss of jobs from the industry in D.C. for any comparable period since 2001. Perez’s response was a wholly inadequate attempt at pettifogging. Not only does he not specifically address the federal government’s own data showing D.C.’s job loss, he changes the subject to another city that hiked the minimum wage, Seattle:
The problem is that, while Seattle’s restaurant industry did support the minimum wage hike there, that was likely done for political reasons—not because they thought it wouldn’t hurt job growth. The actual data on how Seattle’s minimum wage hike has affected Seattle is mixed to bad, and anecdotally, there are horror stories.
But ultimately, this is not a complicated issue. The long-term consensus of economists and economic studies has always been that higher wages result in fewer jobs. It’s only recently that wage stagnation, likely brought on by sclerotic liberal economic and regulatory policies, has forced Democrats to cast about for an immediate solution to this problem and encourage a strange new respect for partisan economists willing to deny the correlation between supply and demand.
And let’s not forget minimum wage increases are also an artificial attempt to make the wages demanded by America’s failing unions competitive. Not coincidentally, unions are the Democratic party’s biggest donors. It would certainly be awkward if we took an objective look at the minimum wage data and found Democrats were enriching a their favorite special interest by taking away jobs for America’s poorest workers.
