Seattle Maxes Out The Minimum Wage, Ctd

David Dayen lays into Jordan Weissmann’s “scare tactics” regarding Seattle’s proposed $15 minimum wage:

Seattle actually sought out studies on what would happen after a large minimum wage increase. In March, Mayor Murray released a report from three professors at UC Berkeley who looked at the impact of local wage laws on employment, and specifically whether businesses move outside local borders for lower labor costs. Simply put, the researchers found no such dynamic.

Matt Taylor also doubts the wage hike will crash the city’s economy:

“What is important is the phase-in period rather than the number,” said Dean Baker, an economist and founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

“It’s fair to say if we were going to make it $15 next year I’d be very worried. But if you make it [that] over 7 years, there’s 15 percent inflation or somewhere around there, so in today’s dollars a $15 minimum wage would be something in the order of $12.75 [by the time it takes effect]. Right off the bat that sounds less worrisome. You’re not going to see firms going out of business because of this.” …

So please, let’s not start panicking about endtimes for Seattle and its utopian ideals of economic fairness. It’s necessary to at least pause and consider research that shows minimum wage hikes can have a modest negative affect on overall employment—specifically among teenagers—but as Slate’s $15 wage critic Jordan Weissmann himself points out, that side effect is perfectly acceptable so long as most workers are making out better in the long run. What data is there to suggest that will not be the case for Seattle?

Danny Vinik thinks it’s an important experiment even if it runs the risk of backfiring:

Massachusetts implemented the first non-compulsory minimum-wage law in 1912. Within the next eight years, 12 other states and the District of Columbia had their own minimum wage laws, although the Supreme Court struck down D.C.’s law that set a minimum wage for women and child laborers. In 1938, Congress passed a national minimum wage as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act and it eventually withstood a Supreme Court challenge.

The Massachusetts law could have been a disaster for its citizens, as no one knew for sure how a minimum wage would affect the economy. Instead, it laid the groundwork for a national minimum wage. Seattle’s low-wage workers may ultimately suffer for its $15 minimum wage, as conservatives and even some liberals are predicting. If it succeeds, though, Democrats would have a case for a higher national minimum wage than $10.10. We won’t know unless we try—a scary prospect for Seattle, but exciting for the rest of us.