It is a well-established truth that minimum-wage laws hurt many of the people they are intended to help. When lawmakers raise the lowest wage at which someone may legally be employed, workers at the bottom of the economic ladder often find themselves unemployable.
“There’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed,” The New York Times editorial board observed back in 1987. “Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market.”
Really, what could be more self-evident? All other things being equal, when you raise the price of something, demand for that something goes down. It’s true of cigarettes, meals in restaurants, airline reservations, and visits to Disney World. It’s just as true of low- and unskilled workers. Make it more expensive to hire marginalized or inexperienced employees and fewer such employees will be hired. In 2021, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office calculated the impact of hiking the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour from the current $7.25. Its conclusion was that 1.4 million workers would lose their jobs.
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