The Cruelty of the $15 Minimum Wage

[jct74]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBjsQL7ZFvc

The $15 minimum wage just went from "laughable" to "viable"—as a New York Times headline put it—to the law of the land for millions of New York and California residents.

In April 2016, the Empire and Golden states almost simultaneously passed laws that will boost the state-mandated wage floor to $15 over the next few years for all workers—a high-stakes bet that the law of supply and demand doesn't apply to human labor.

To discuss the potential impact of the $15 minimum wage, Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Don Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University, who writes frequently about the minimum wage at his blog, Cafe Hayek.

About 9:30 minutes.

 

[Ronin Truth]

The unions like it.

 

[jct74]

How High Would You Make the Minimum Wage? We Asked L.A. Residents.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFLqYYRpNMQ

To many, raising the minimum wage seems like a no-brainer. If the poorest workers can simply make more money per hour, they’ll be lifted out of poverty, right?

But would supporters change their minds if drastic wage hikes resulted in some nasty unintended consequences, both for the poor and for others?

California's governor Jerry Brown signed a bill raising the state's wage to $15 an hour, despite admitting that, from an economic standpoint, such a hike "may not make sense." Fifteen dollars an hour is a wage that Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have each advocated for as a federal minimum, even though a CBO report estimated that even President Obama's more modest proposed hike to $10.10 an hour would result in about 500,000 American jobs lost.

Reason TV visited Los Angeles' hipster enclave of Silver Lake to find out how high residents would like to see the minimum wage go and to discuss some of the possible outcomes of a wage hike on the local economy.

 

[dannno]

The unions like it.

The unions want an exception and to be able to pay union employees wages lower than $15/hr to encourage union labor!!