Kind of like unemployment insurance extensions and "free" health care. Sounds good, is bad.

Liberals: pseudo kind, stupid and always wrong in so many ways. 

Can't you just see a vision of the "O" giving a speech?  "We can't go back to the policies of the past resulting in full employment and economic growth.  No, we need social justice, high minimum wage, free heath care for all, green jobs and new bridges for all!  Yes we can!...have high unemployment, yes we can!...have stagnation and little economic growth.  The politics of class warfare will get us to the promised land."

Today marks the first anniversary of Congress's decision to raise the federal minimum wage by 41% to $7.25 an hour. But hold the confetti. According to a new study, more than 100,000 fewer teens are employed today due to the wage hikes.




Economic slowdowns are tough on many job-seekers, but they're especially hard on the young and inexperienced, whose job prospects have suffered tremendously from Washington's ill-advised attempts to put a floor under wages. In a new paper published by the Employment Policies Institute, labor economists William Even of Miami University in Ohio and David Macpherson of Trinity University in Texas find a significant drop in teen employment as a direct result of the minimum wage hikes.
The wage hikes were implemented in three stages between 2007 and 2009, and not all states were affected because some already mandated a minimum wage above the federal requirement. But for the 19 states affected by all three stages of the federal wage increase, "there was a 6.9% decline in employment for teens aged 16 to 19," write the authors. And for those who had not completed high school, "we estimmate the wage hikes reduced employment by 12.4%," which translates to about 98,000 fewer teens in the work force.

After isolating for other economic factors and broadening their analysis to include all 32 states affected by any stage of the federal wage increase, the authors conclude that "the federal minimum-wage hikes reduced teen employment by 2.5% translating to approximately 114,400 fewer employed teens."


Minimum wage proponents often claim that a higher wage floor will reduce poverty, ignoring that most minimum wage earners aren't poor. "A small fraction of minimum-wage workers are the sole breadwinner for their family," said Mr. Macpherson in an interview. "Historically, the number is one-in-six. So five-in-six are either secondary earners, or kids living with mom and dad, or kids living alone, such as college students."