Democratic Party economists warehoused in academia between elections have spent decades denying that minimum wage increases cause unemployment. Unfortunately, they do.
“At the Great Recession’s bottom, African-American teens had an unemployment rate of nearly 50 percent while the rate for all teens was 27.1 percent,” a column on the BET website notes. “In the weak post-Recession, many teens compete for jobs against down-sized adults with college degrees.”
“And economists William Even from Miami University and David Macpherson from Trinity University report that when a state, or the federal government, increases the minimum wage, Black teens are more likely to be laid off.” It should be noted that BET has never been mistaken for Fox or One America News. In other words, this is not a right-wing network or site.
“The report focused on 16-to 24-year-old males without a high school diploma and found that for each 10 percent increase in the federal or state minimum wage employment for young Black males decreased 6.5 percent,” according to BET. “By contrast, after the same wage boost, employment for white and Hispanic males fell respectively just 2.5 percent and 1.2 percent.”
“The real hit for Black teens occurred, however, in the 21 states that had the federal minimum wage increase in 2007, 2008 and 2009. The findings reveal that while 13,200 Black young adults lost their jobs as a direct result of the recession nearly 40 percent more, a total of 18,500, were fired because of the rise in the federal minimum wage, raising the researchers’ question: ‘Why do black males suffer more harm from wage mandates than their white or Hispanic counterparts?’”
It’s a question they might want to ask at Town Hall meetings, of the congressmen who voted for the increase.
