But he cut his teeth arguing that minimum wage increases do not, in fact, increase unemployment. Hanauer writes that Card and Krueger show that, 'contrary to conventional economic orthodoxy, increases in the minimum wage increase employment.' And it's true that in two papers from the 1990s, one on the fast food industry and the other by Card on the state-by-state effect of federal increases in the minimum wage, the team found modest increases in employment follow an hike.Īlan Krueger, left, today chairs Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Hanauer's description of the work of Council of Economic Advisers chair Alan Krueger and UC Berkeley economist David Card on the minimum wage is incomplete, to put it generously.

It's never a good sign when the argument relies on mischaracterizing evidence.

That's way beyond anything Obama, Miller and Harkin, or CAP is proposing. Hanauer proposes raising the minimum wage to $15, a more than doubling of the federal minimum. A recent report from the New America Foundation's Michael Lind includes a long argument for the superiority of the minimum wage to other means of raising wages, like the Earned Income Tax Credit.īut no one's proposal goes quite as far as that of Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist worth hundreds of millions of dollars who's made a name for himself as an extremely wealthy critic of economic inequality. The Center for American Progress's massive economic growth plan calls for setting the minimum at one half the average wage for production and non-supervisory workers at the current average, that means a minimum of $10.04 an hour. Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced legislation to established a $10.10 an hour minimum.

President Obama, of course, proposed increasing the federal minimum from $7.25 to $9 an hour, and indexing it to inflation thereafter, in this year's State of the Union address. Raising the minimum wage is so hot right now.

Salariu minim pe economie 2019