For low-skilled workers, life is hard. Minimum-wage hikes make it harder

[agent00f]

If you can bother to read into the report a bit more you will see that there is a decreased chance of being employed. Saying "When things are largely unchanged, they aren't harder." fails to take that into account. There are winners (those who remain employed and get a small bump in wages) and losers (those who got fired or who weren't hired). While those numbers come close to balancing out in the aggregate there are still losers and life for the losers is harder meaning the title is not incorrect

Funny when your claim didn't pan out you resort to getting rather desperate to find something, anything, that might still work:

"We estimate that the impact of the Ordinance was a 1.1 percentage point decrease in likelihood of low-wage Seattle workers remaining employed."

I'll leave it as an exercise to you find their margin of error.

Agreed but you may not be on the side in that argument that you think you are on

So when you highlighted this claim of "Yet, our best estimates find that the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance appears to have lowered employment rates of low-wage workers.", were you not aware of the subsequent sentence which counteracts it with higher earnings or did you choose to lie? In other words, were you ignorant as suggested or a liar?

 

[nickqt]

As an Australian I always find these topic's mind blowing. Our minimum wage is around ~$17 AUD an hour (AUD= 0.75 USD right now), our employment rate has been tied to global economic performance just like the US. Economy's around the world are going nowhere after the GFC because wealth has been redistributed to the rich. The rich don't spend their money like the middle class do. When there is no one left to buy your products what will organisations do?

The removal of the middle class in the first world to me is one of the biggest issue for modern societies that isn't being addressed in anyway. lots of people with a bit of disposable income is a lot better then a few people with lots of disposable income.

Here in the US, Capitalism is a religion, with the FreeMarket, Invisible Hand, and the JobCreators as the holy trinity that cannot be questioned.

Sure, the economy has gone to shit in the past 36 years since Reagan and voodoo economics (h/t George H. W. Bush) was implemented, but if we just cut taxes on the richest people in the solar system a bit more...then something something it will trickle down, something something massive influx of revenues!

Everyone with a fucking brain knows that supply side is a load of bullshit that makes the rich richer while allowing the country's infrastructure to crumble and at the same time destroying the middle class, but our delusional conservative chumps would rather continue thinking that they weren't useful idiots for their entire political lives than join the rest of us in objective, observable reality to change course.

Also: Benghazi.