Evening Must-Read: Jason Furman and Betsey Stevenson: Congressional Budget Office Report Finds Minimum Wage Lifts Wages for 16.5 Million Workers

Jason Furman and Betsey Stevenson: Congressional Budget Office Report Finds Minimum Wage Lifts Wages for 16.5 Million Workers: “The new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report finds that 16.5 million workers would get a raise from increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour and this would help millions of hard-working families, reduce poverty, and increase the overall wages going to lower-income households.

On employment, CBO’s central estimate is that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would lead to a 0.3 percent decrease in employment and CBO acknowledges that the employment impact could be essentially zero. But even these estimates do not reflect the overall consensus view of economists which is that raising the minimum wage has little or no negative effect on employment.  For example, seven Nobel Prize winners and more than 600 other economists recently stated that: “In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market.”

I would say that, at current levels, the effectiveness of raising the minimum wage at making work pay is a positive that far, far, far outweighs what the overwhelming bulk of the evidence says is a very, very minor disemployment effect.

I still believe demand curves slope down…