Minimum Wages Set to Increase in 10 States in 2013

Keep an eye on what happens to their unemployment numbers next year

New Years Day will bring a small pay bump to some of the lowest-paid American workers, with 10 states set to hike their minimum wages for 2013.

Nearly a million low-wage workers will see their earnings rise because of the increases, most of which come courtesy of state cost-of-living adjustments that account for inflation. Washington State will once again have the highest minimum wage in the nation, at $9.19 per hour, after a raise of 15 cents for the new year. The other states raising their wage floors are Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont.

The federal minimum wage remains $7.25 per hour, with no cost-of-living adjustment, and prevails in 31 states that do not mandate a higher state minimum wage. The last raise to the federal minimum came in 2009, after a series of increases signed into law by President George W. Bush.

Comments

[Sevo]

...'the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. EPI estimates that another 140,000 people will benefit indirectly from the wage hikes, due to pay scales being upwardly adjusted."

Does EPI estimate how many people will lose from the increased costs of the economic goods affected by the increased labor costs? Not on your life! EPI, being a 'left-leaning think tank' is entirely too stupid to even understand that those losses exist, nor to have any concept of the effects.
I'm sure the members of EPI are just thrilled with the wonderful intent of their brain-dead policies, and probably go home and pat themselves on the back for raising prices on goods poor people buy.
Put simply, the members of EPI are self righteous, sleazy ignoramuses.

[Sean Mack]

This is really fine example of why there can be no such thing as objectivity in journalism.

The opening line: "New Year's Day will bring a small pay bump..." is not ambitiously TRYING to state an economic fallacy, it merely does so by accident. The author at HuffPo was probably just going for word variety. He didn't want the opening line to restate the header, and so he thought "Well, what's another way to say the minimum wage is increasing? I know, I'll say that workers are getting a raise." Of course the idea that mandated minimum wage increases are synonymous with actual wage increases is a point of serious contention.

It would be far too complicated, and no doubt against some written or unwritten HuffPo policy, to say the truth: "Depending on which economist you ask, marginal participants in the labor force will either get a small raise at the expense of their exploiters OR they will be arbitrarily priced out of the job market next week, thanks to an automatice change in the minimum wage law of 13 states..."