Every serious economist warned that this social justice gimmick would have exactly the result that it did. And you know that the left's response to this will be to double now.
Left-wing policies can never have bad results. It's always the fault of sabotage, subversion and someone else. Just ask Venezuela or the USSR. Or the low wage workers of Seattle.
In January 2016, Seattle’s minimum wage jumped from $11 an hour to $13 for large employers, the second big increase in less than a year. New research released Monday by a team of economists at the University of Washington suggests the wage hike may have come at a significant cost: The increase led to steep declines in employment for low-wage workers, and a drop in hours for those who kept their jobs. Crucially, the negative impact of lost jobs and hours more than offset the benefits of higher wages — on average, low-wage workers earned $125 per month less because of the higher wage, a small but significant decline.
Again, this was entirely predictable.
The simple concept that the left refuses to grasp is that society is not a static Rubik's Cube where you can solve the puzzle by making every square red. It's a series of dynamic responses to conditions.
The economy is a network of responses in which each grid affects the others and causes them to react in ways that serve their own interests. If you raise the minimum wage to $15, jobs and hours will be cut to compensate. There was nothing surprising about this except to the left which has decided that reality is an inconvenient truth.
Aggressive minimum hikes have closed some businesses, pushed others toward automation and pushed still others into more basic cost reductions. As always some workers win, but others lose.
“The goal of this policy was to deliver higher incomes to people who were struggling to make ends meet in the city,” said Jacob Vigdor, a University of Washington economist who was one of the study’s authors. “You’ve got to watch out because at some point you run the risk of harming the people you set out to help.”
The left doesn't actually want to help them. It wants to help itself. See Moscow, Havana and Seattle.
the number of hours worked by low-wage workers (those earning less than $19 an hour) fell by 9.4 percent over the first nine months of 2016, and the number of low-wage jobs fell by 6.8 percent. Cumulatively, those add up to the losses of 5,000 jobs and 3.5 million hours of work. The average low-wage employee, they found, saw his or her monthly paycheck shrink by $125, or 6.6 percent.
So it's time to penalize businesses some more to punish them for their "greed". And then it really will work.