In fact, polls have shown that more than 90 percent of professional economists contend that increasing the minimum wage lowers employment for minimum-wage workers. Even highly respected economists such as David Card and Alan Krueger, who are skeptical of the consensus view, concede that the minimum-wage hypothesis “is one of the clearest and most widely appreciated in the field of economics.”3 Why? Because a basic tenet of economics is that a rise in the cost of something tends to lower demand for it. Put another way, an artificial increase in the price of something causes less of it to be
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