The real world just kicked advocates of higher minimum wages in the teeth (or maybe someplace even more painful). A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research looks at the impact of the $11 and $13 minimum wages in the city of Seattle and finds very bad results.
Seattle city government is out with a new NBER paper evaluating Seattle’s minimum wage increase to $13 an hour and it finds significant disemployment effects that on net reduce the incomes of minimum wage workers.
Employers were compelled to cut back the working hours of workers, causing a lower income of minimum-wage workers by $125 per month. Political intervention in the free market always hurts lower-income workers. [...]
Puerto Rico’s foreclosure rate has more than doubled in the last decade after the island faced a real-estate crash even worse than the one the Great Recession. Last month Puerto Rico declared bankruptcy on its $73b debt, the largest in U.S. history. This is definitely about politics.
Just where would we be without pop stars to tell us about economic policy? Without Annie Lennox, how would we know that people in poor countries don’t get paid very much? For that is what her latest campaign, The Circle, wants to tell us. According to Lennox, the solution is simple: everyone involved in the garment industry should just be paid more money. This lacks a certain economic sophistication, it must be said. In fact, it arguably lacks any economic understanding at all.
The organized left has transported thousands of demonstrators onto the streets of Chicago in new, unmarked buses, and has equipped the demonstrators with professionally printed signs and banners. [...]
Guest Post by SANJAY KUMAR Ramesh has been working as a daily wager in a Government of India office in Delhi for ten years. He is one of the army of peons, office assistants, security guards, gardeners, and cleaning staff which government offices, city municipalities, hospitals, schools and colleges of the metropolis employ regularly. He … Continue reading The Elephant in the Room – Silence on Class Issues in Indian Politics : Sanjay Kumar
Using the same apartheid-era tactics that kept blacks out of the labor markets, London and Delhi taxi driver unions have been lobbying the local authorities to eliminate the competition for them. If they can make it too expensive for Uber to employ drivers, they can reverting back to the monopoly that allowed them to charge exorbitant fare prices.
People are talking about the minimum wage a lot. They always have. But with the government's plan to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, the talk is even more prevalent than usual. But why now? Why is the government trying to keep us talking about it now?
Haiti’s incarceration rate of roughly 100 prisoners per 100,000 citizens in 2016 was the lowest in the Caribbean. Nevertheless, there is a systematic campaign underway for more prisons. Canada and Norway have each given one prison to Haiti. Thanks to prison aid from the United States, three additional prisons have been inaugurated since 2016, and another is under construction.
