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The Center for American Progress reports:
Think a higher minimum wage is a job killer? Think again: The states that raised their minimum wages on January 1 have seen higher employment growth since then than the states that kept theirs at the same rate.
The minimum wage went up in 13 states Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington either thanks to automatic increases in line with inflation or new legislation, as Ben Wolcott reports in his analysis at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The average change in employment for those states over the first five months of the year as compared with the last five of 2013 is 0.99 percent, while the average for all remaining states is 0.68 percent.
Digging deeper, all but one of those states are experiencing increases in employment, and nine of them have seen growth above the median rate.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday July 04 2014, @06:15PM
You know the saying: there are lies, damned lies and statistics. By carefully defining your terms and picking your data, you can prove just about anything.
I don't have the time or interest to analyse the report in detail, to see whether or not they have played games with the numbers. However, I do note that the organization that published this report is also an organization that campaigns for minimum wage increases, so they are not exactly a neutral source for analysis.
Just a couple of points that they do not address:
- Is any of this seasonal? They only look at the first five months of the year, and different states will have different seasonal patterns.
- They do not compare to previous years. California leads the pack - do they lead the pack every year? Are these results better or worse than expected based on previous years?
- What is the definition of unemployment? The federal government makes unemployment figures look artificially low by removing anyone who has given up finding employment (see "Shadow Stats" for a more realistic view). A state with many long-term unemployed people may show a decrease in unemployment as discouraged job-seekers are taken off the books.
Maybe the news really is good, but the study does not seem to address any of these difficult issues - it looks more like a propaganda piece...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.