A FEW MONTHS BACK, the New York Times reversed itself on the flat tax: In the recent past it supported the idea without reservation, today it opposes the fiat tax unequivocally. Now the Times has done it again on the minimum wage. On April 5, it endorsed an increase in the minimum wage from $ 4.25 to $ 5.15, as proposed by President Clinton and congressional Democrats. “There is a strong case for raising the minimum wage,” the Times said. However, there is a far stronger case for not raising the minimum wage, and for 20 years the Times’s own editorials consistently made it.
As recently as June 15, 1989, the Times said “higher minimum wages sound humane but in practice are an obtuse, ineffective way to help poor workers.” There are two reastms for this. First, the benefits of a higher minimum wage go to both rich and poor families alike. “Most minimum wage workers are members of middle- and upper-income families,” the Times correctly noted. Second, low-income families bear much of the cost of a higher minimum wage. “When forced to raise wages for low-paid jobs, employers will hire fewer workers. The number of lost jobs will be relatively small. But disadvantaged teenagers desperately trying to establish work careers will be among the victims,” the Times pointed out.
These twin themes, that higher minimum wages mainly benefit the well-off while reducing job opportunities for the poor, were repeated in numerous Times editorials throughout the 1970s and 1980s. On September 21, 1988, for example, the Times observed that “five out of six jobs paying the minimum wage are not held by poor people at all, but by the teenage children of middle-income families or by second earners in families with few children.” And what aid does get to the poor comes at a price. “The catch is that a higher minimum wage would also induce businesses to get by with fewer employees,” the Times wrote.
In a July 11, 1988, editorial, the Times argued that raising the minimum wage would be inflationary and add to government welfare costs, through higher unemployment. Together, these effects would worsen an already bloated budget deficit.
An April 15, 1987, editorial was aimed directly at Democrats. “Democratic legislators are right to search for ways to help the working poor,” the Times said, “but wrong to think that raising the minimum wage is one of them. To do that would hurt many low-income workers, something legislators need to grasp before ramming a bill through Congress.” The reason is that employers would circumvent the higher minimum by hiring underground labor or letting workers go. The Times thought that a higher minimum wage “would probably price many working poor people out of jobs, since they could not demonstrate the productivity necessary to justify the higher wage.”
In a truly remarkable editorial on January 14, 1987, the Times even went so far as to call for outright abolition of the minimum wage. The title read: “The Right Minimum Wage: $ 0.00.” In this editorial the Times argued that “the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed.” Raising it only means fewer jobs, with the greatest burden falling on “young, poor workers, who already face formidable barriers to getting and keeping jobs.” The Times believed that using a minimum wage to fight poverty is a ” fundamentally flawed” idea. “It’s time to put this hoary debate behind us, and find a better way to improve the lives of people who work very hard for very little,” the Times concluded.
And lest one think that supporting abolition of the minimum wage was some kind of one-time aberration, the Times earlier had made the same argument in a December 2, 1980, editorial. Increasing the minimum wage would only fuel inflation, the Times said, because “every raise for those at the bottom of the income ladder creates pressure to raise the wages of those on the higher rungs.” The best course, therefore, “would be to abandon the minimum wage altogether.”
An August 29, 1977, editorial said that “evidence linking the minimum wage to joblessness is compelling.” On August 17, 1977, the Times thought that “the basic effect of an increase in the minimum wage . . . would be to intensify the cruel competition among the poor for scarce jobs.” It concluded that “minimum wage legislation has no place in a strategy to eliminate poverty.”
A March 21, 1977, Times editorial even attacked labor unions for driving support for a higher minimum wage. Organized labor only supported a higher minimum wage, in the editors’ view, because it reduces management resistance to union recruiting. “Where cheap alternative sources of labor are eliminated, high-priced union labor no longer looks so bad to company managers,” the Times said.
Thus we see that New York Times editorials were consistently critical of the minimum wage for almost 20 years, even endorsing its abolition. Why the Times has suddenly changed direction 180 degrees is unknown. It would seem that keeping up with liberal fashion has become more important to the Times than maintaining intellectual consistency.
Bruce Bartlett is a senior fellow with the Dallas- based National Center for Policy Analysis.
