The Congressional Budget Office’s dim view of efforts to raise the national minimum wage to $15 an hour is wrongheaded and based on bad data, according to an article published this week by the Washington Post.
Funnily enough, the Post’s story never gets around to saying why, exactly, the CBO’s findings are wrong. The reader is told merely to take the article and the many, many pro-wage hike critics it cites at their word.
The CBO released a report this week showing a national $15 an hour minimum wage would boost wages for roughly 17 million workers while eliminating approximately 1.3 million jobs. That is not a great trade-off. If anything, the report, whose conclusions are drawn from the findings of more than 50 individual studies on the effect of minimum-wage increases on employment and family income, served as a major blow to wage hike advocates.
But do not worry, says the Post. The CBO’s findings are bogus because wage hike advocates say so, the paper explained this week. This is not even an ungenerous paraphrasing of the Post’s analysis.
The article, titled “It’s not just paychecks: The surprising society-wide benefits of raising the minimum wage,” begins with the premise that it is not a question of whether a $15 minimum wage will kill jobs, but “just how transformative” it will be. The rest of the article follows in that general vein.
The article quotes Economic Policy Institute economist Ben Zipperer, who claims the CBO report is actually “an acknowledgment that raising the minimum wage hasn’t proven to be as dangerous as researchers once feared.” He also claims the CBO draws on “older research that the new research has pointed out is problematic.”
Neither Zipperer nor the Post explain which of the data cited by the CBO is “older” or contradicted by newer research.
The story then quotes Berkeley economist Michael Reich, who claims the CBO “appears to have picked a grab bag of high-quality and now-discredited studies, and weighted them all the same in their analysis,” adding further that this “reveals an unwillingness to recognize the major differences in scientific quality among studies.”
Neither Reich nor the Post explain which of the multiple studies cited by the CBO are “now-discredited.”
The Post does, however, highlight one of Reich’s own studies, which, unsurprisingly, contradicts the supposedly flawed CBO report. The Post also cites a study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which also contradicts the CBO report. The Post goes on to cite additional studies, all of which boost the claim that the benefits of a wage hike far, far outweigh the cost. The article cites a study showing that raising the minimum wage by 10% could reduce suicides by 3.6%. The paper cites a study that claims a 50% increase in the minimum wage could reduce the “likelihood someone will return to prison within a year by 2.8 percent.” The Post cites a study that found a “higher wage floor was associated with a modest rise in employment of older workers.”
What the Post does not bother to address, however, are any of the supposedly defective studies that the CBO report relies on to draw its own conclusions. The Post’s readers are told simply that the agency’s findings are no good because better analyses have been published since 2014. Also, because an ideologically aligned group of experts say so.
In short, the article reads more like opinion and advocacy than a straight news report, which is probably why the Post added an “analysis” tag to the story after publication, but that label seems a bit generous for this particular article.
