Remember that time Seattle's socialist city council member Shama Sawan pressed for the city to increase its minimum wage to $15 per hour?

I actually debated Sambant on the issue. I asked her if she'd be in favor of raising the minimum wage to $1,000 per hour.

She misdirected, obviously. Seattle actually ended up embracing $13 per hour, raising the minimum wage from $9.47 in 2014 to $11 in 2015 to 13 bucks in 2016, under the theory that an increase wouldn't throw people out of work, wouldn't encourage part-time hiring, and would inflate salaries enough to allow more affordability in the Seattle housing market.

A new study demonstrates that, as usual, central planning of the economy leads to precisely the reverse of the results the central

planners seek to achieve. According to a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research,

quote, using a variety of methods to analyze employment in all sectors paying below a specified

real hourly wage, we conclude that the second wage increase to 13 bucks, reduced hours

worked in low-wage jobs by around 9%

while hourly wages in such jobs increased by only around 3%.

Consequently, total payroll fell for such jobs

implying that the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees' earnings

by an average of $125 per month in 2016.

Evidence attributes more modest effects to the first wage increase.

We estimate an effect of zero when analyzing employment in the restaurant industry at all wage

levels comparable to many prior studies. In other words, restaurants didn't fire anybody.

They just put them on part-time shifts and cut back their hours. That shouldn't be a surprise,

since that's exactly what happens every time the government places an extra burden on employers.

One of the great myths of minimum wage movement and the central planning movement as a whole is that business owners aren't operating at a slim margin but raking in dollars to hide in their scrooge mctuck money bins depleting the potential income of their employees.

That's not true. Thanks to competition, and competition is

fierce in industries that employ minimum wage workers, profit margins are never enormous. Even in

2013, a booming year for the restaurant business, Capital IQ estimated the average profit margin

for restaurants at 2.4%. Profitability varies by chain as well and by local franchise. Even

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