Dr. Jonah Goldberg on the Minimum Wage

Pseudo-expert on everything decides that the Minimum Wage Minimizes Jobs by doing extensive empirical work, while watching checking out Faux News. Yes, Brit Hume finds some anecdotal evidence in Arizona but then gets serious by checking out a Federal Reserve study. Actually, the Faux News link pulls up 2470 references to the Federal Reserve and Brit forgot to tell us which one. But he did provide this:

for every ten percent increase in the minimum wage – there is a corresponding two to three percent decrease in employment.

I know that AB readers get the point but let’s say this really slowly so Jonah might be able to follow. What this line means is that the labor demand curve is INELASTIC. So with an elasticity of demand of only 0.2, labor income actually goes up by 8% if the wage increase is increased by 10%. I do hope Jonah got this simple point finally – as I would hate to have to go over this ad nausam during office hours.