Katherine Mangu-Ward Discusses Unemployment and Minimum Wage at HuffPost Live!

Join me in a few minutes over at Huffington Post Live, where I'll be chatting about unemployment, the minimum wage, and Paul Ryan's budget:

Guests:

• Katherine Mangu-Ward  @kmanguward (Washington, DC) Managing Editor at Reason Magazine & Reason.com
• Dave Jamieson  @dave_jamieson (Washington, DC) HuffPost Workplace Reporter

Comments

[Sevo]

Trudeau spent his entire half-page of the Sunday comix trying to claim raising the MW won't hurt the economy.
I guess he forgets he's a cartoonist now and then; not real bright.

[Mickey Rat]

Being for a minimum wage of $10.10 means you want to make it illegal for anyone's whose work is worth $10.09 or less to be employed, yet theses people convince themselves that they are helping the poor.

[Suthenboy]

"...theses people convince themselves that they are helping the poor."

No they are not. They know full well what they are doing.

[kmc212]

With raising the minimum wage you will get the double whammy: inflation and an increase in unemployment.

[Suthenboy]

That photo looks like something from an Atlas Shrugged movie set.

[Mickey Rat]

Ilove the Leftists argument that we have to endure lousy economic policies because they poll well.

Did KMW not have much to say, or was she cut off? It seemed to be a filibuster by the "Pro-" guy on both issues and KMW made some very general economics points but did not do much arguing over specifics.

[~Knarf Yenrab~]

Clearly you folks don't understand macroeconomics. See, if you design a meta-analysis that's wholly incapable of utilizing the experimental method and introduce dummy variables to stack the deck as you like, you'd learn that increasing the minimum wage by a small amount does not have a significant effect on unemployment. All this talk about the minimum wage as a means of eliminating a range of voluntary contracts and employment while growing the welfare state (and the party of social democracy, oddly enough) is just bosh.

All of which is to say that we should raise the minimum wage 30% in the worst economy in more than a generation. Because forcing the price of labor to remain higher than the market clearing price is the way economies grow, as the United States discovered 80 years ago.