Indirect Links

Since the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, business interests and conservative politicians have warned that raising the minimum wage would be ruinous. Even modest increases, they’ve asserted, will cause the U.S. economy to hemorrhage jobs, shutter businesses, reduce labor hours, and disproportionately cast young people, so-called low-skilled workers, and workers of color to the bread lines. As recently as this year, the same claims have been repeated, nearly verbatim.

This goes against a lot of what gets written about what it does to jobs.

You will likely have encountered the common assertion that we need to send people into trade schools to address problems like college dropout rates and soft labor markets for certain categories of workers. As The Atlantic recently pointed out, the idea that we need to be sending more people to trade and tech schools has broad…

If you live in Seattle, you can clearly see the economy booming all around you. We have more restaurants than at any time in our history, our regional unemployment rate is lower than it’s been in…

The UK currently has the lowest ever unemployment and the highest ever minimum wage.

Does raising taxes on the rich really trigger their migration to more obliging states or countries? This study of every million-dollar earner in the US shows otherwise