Economists with the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California-Berkeley have found similar results in studies of the six other cities that have raised their minimum wages in the past decade, and in the 21 states with higher base pay than the federal minimum. Businesses, they found, absorbed the costs through lower job turnover, small price increases, and higher productivity.
It’s the taxpayers who ultimately pick up the tab for low wages, because the government subsidizes the working poor.
Obviously, there’s a limit to how high you can raise the minimum wage without harming the economy, but evidence suggests we’re nowhere close to that tipping point. The ratio between the United States’ minimum wage and its median wage has been slipping for years—it’s now far lower than in the rest of the developed world. Even after San Francisco increases its minimum wage to $15 next year, it will still amount to just 46 percent of the median wage, putting the city well within the normal historical range.
The bigger threat to the economy may come from
not raising the minimum wage. Even Wall Street analysts
agree that our ever-widening income inequality threatens to dampen economic growth. And according to a
new study by the UC-Berkeley Labor Center, it’s the taxpayers who ultimately pick up the tab for low wages, because the federal government subsidizes the working poor through social-service programs to the tune of $153 billion a year.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/04/economic-collapse-prediction-minimum-wage-raise/