The Misguided Movement For The $15 Minimum Wage Hits Florida

As the election season switches into high gear, the number of commercials has been going up.  One that caught my ears is that here in Florida there is a proposed constitutional amendment that will raise the state's minimum wage, which is already higher than the Federal min wage, to $15/hr over the next several years.  This will be Amendment 2 on your Florida ballots, and my sample ballot reads like this:

Raises minimum wage to $10.00 per hour effective September 30th, 2021. Each September 30th thereafter, minimum wage shall increase by $1.00 per hour until the minimum wage reaches $15.00 per hour on September 30th, 2026. From that point forward, future minimum wage increases shall revert to being adjusted annually for inflation starting September 30th, 2027.

This was submitted by a lobbying organization called Florida For A Fair Wage, run by Florida's favorite best known ambulance chaser, John Morgan, the guy who raised the money to push through medical marijuana and whose commercials and billboards blanket the Southeast US (I've seen them as far as Tennessee during our eclipse trip in 2017).  Morgan has been rumored to be planning a run for Governor for years.  For those who don't know, Florida's minimum wage is $8.56, already $1.31/hr more than the Federal min wage of $7.25.

John Morgan has been outdone.  According to FEE, the Swiss city of Geneva has just voted to enact a minimum wage of $25/hr.  Morgan should cancel his amendment and start the process over again.  

I know I've said before that I'm really sick and tired of this subject.  I always say the law is going to hurt the very people it's supposed to help, but the stupid laws pass and the predicted bad things happen.  A few years later, they say the fix is to repeat it with a different number for min wage.  It's like watching an imbecile sticking a metal fork in the wall outlet over and over.  You tell them, "don't do that - you'll get hurt."  You watch them do it, get knocked over by the power, then they wobble back to stick the fork in the outlet again. 

 

Examples are everywhere because cities have been passing much higher minimum wages for much of the last decade and in every case, workers suffered.  Many had their hours cut, other lost their jobs.  Restaurants went out of business.  I've written about it so many times, it's hard to pick out stories.  Here's one, how 'bout one from 2016?  More?

So, it’s no surprise that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that enacting a $15 minimum wage nationwide would destroy up to 3.7 million jobs and decrease total income for Americans below the poverty line by roughly $16 billion. The Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe wrote that the research “disproves the idea that a $15 federal minimum wage creates any net benefit” and shows how the policy “simply reshuffles the problems plaguing our economy, on the whole creating more new problems than it solves.”

and

“The main finding of economic theory and empirical research over the past 70 years is that minimum wage increases tend to reduce employment,” the Cato Institute concluded in a research review. “While minimum wages ostensibly aim to improve the economic well-being of the working poor, the disemployment effects of minimum wages have been found to fall disproportionately on the least skilled and on the most disadvantaged individuals, including the disabled, youth, lower-skilled workers, immigrants, and ethnic minorities.”

There's a saying that if you took all the economists on Earth and laid them end to end they wouldn't reach a conclusion.  It may be true all the economists wouldn't agree but a substantial majority of them agreed that raising the minimum wage is a bad thing to do. 

A 2019 survey by the Employment Policies Institute found that 75 percent of professional economists oppose increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour. This wasn’t political: In an interesting twist, almost all the responding economists identified as Democrats or Independents, with just 12 percent identifying as registered Republicans.

An even larger percentage, 84 percent, believed a $15 minimum wage would have negative effects on youth employment.  The younger workers, looking for that first job, or a summer job during school just aren't worth that $15. 

 

Given all this, you can be sure how I'm voting on this proposal. On a more anal-retentive, practical note, while the bill says future wage increases beyond $15/hr will be based on inflation, they fail to mention which of the dozens of ways to measure inflation is to be used. 

 

Source at FEE.