Up is Down

St. Louis' minimum wage has reverted to $7.70 because of opposition from Gov. Eric Greitens to a brief increase to $10.

Greitens announced the reversal in July, arguing that the increase would kill jobs.

  Business Insider

That old saw.

St. Louis passed an ordinance in 2015 mandating that the city's minimum wage increase to $10 by 2017. A court battle between Missouri's state legislature and the city of St. Louis ensued, with the city's minimum wage eventually rising to $10 in May of this year.

Yeah? How many jobs were lost?

That wage was slated to increase further to $11 an hour next January. Greitens, however, supported a recent bill in the Missouri legislature that prohibited cities from creating a different minimum wage from the statewide one.

The new law went into effect Monday, putting about 35,000 people who benefited from the increase to $10 at risk of a pay cut.

But somehow, that's not taking money out of their pockets?

Greitens' claim that raising the minimum wage would "kill jobs" is not supported by economic research.

No shit. Greitens doesn't believe in science.

The National Employment Law Project released an exhaustive report in 2016 looking at every federal minimum-wage hike since 1938. The investigators found that year-over-year employment increased 68% of the time after a wage hike. What's more, the industries most affected by minimum wage more often saw jumps in employment: 73% of the time in retail and 82% in leisure and hospitality. [ed: emphasis mine]

[...]

The only times when minimum-wage increases correlated to a decline in employment were during or near recessions. In most other cases, there was a neutral or positive relationship.

Then I guess we better keep making recessions.

When it was created in 1938, the US federal minimum wage was 25 cents. As a percentage of gross domestic product per capita, that would equate to a wage of about $20 an hour today.

I don't understand why people like Greitens are stuck on this idea that companies have to be protected from paying a decent wage. The only reason I can think of is that some companies are putting money into their pockets and campaign chests. (Or worse - they want to keep an underclass.)  It's certainly not because it's actually good for their states' economies.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.