Be sure to check out a new report that the good folks at Carolina Forward have published this morning about the minimum wage. As it notes, the fact that Virginia raised its wage substantially and that North Carolina has not, provides a handy experiment to see which of two very similar neighboring states is making the best policy choice.
Not surprisingly, it’s Virginia.
Here are some excerpts from “The Great Wage Experiment”:
In 2019, Democrats won control of the Virginia state legislature, sealing unified Democratic control of the Commonwealth for the first time in 26 years. Among their very first priorities upon assuming office in 2020 was raising Virginia’s state minimum wage. Democrats promptly passed a phased-in minimum wage hike, which will bring the state minimum to $15 an hour by 2026. As currently structured, the phase-in looks like this:
- $9.50 effective May 1, 2021
- $11.00 effective January 1, 2022
- $12.00 effective January 1, 2023
- $13.50 effective January 1, 2025
- $15.00 effective January 1, 2026
(Republicans, who won control of the Virginia State House and governorship in 2021, have vowed to repeal the minimum wage hike. But because Democrats still control the Virginia State Senate, it is unclear whether they’ll actually be able to do so.)
Virginia’s conservative big business community, led by its state Chamber of Commerce and most Republicans, loudly opposed the 2020 minimum wage hike by predicting dire consequences for job growth, calling higher wages a “job...
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