Minimum Wage Increases Unemployment

Three good articles on the negatives of the coming minimum wage increase:

The first is The Wall Street Journal article, "Delay the Minimum-Wage Hike" by David Neumark.

Based on 20 years of research, I doubt there is ever a goodtime to raise the minimum wage. However, with the aggregate unemployment rate at 9.4%, the teen unemployment rate exceeding 22%, and the unemployment rate for black teens nearing 40%, next month's increase seems like the worst timing possible.

The second is by Mark Perry of Carpe Diem Blog, which has a very interesting chart on how minimum wage kills teenage jobs.

The other article is,"The Coming Minimum Wage Increase" by David Henderson.

Early in the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover made things worse by persuading big businessmen to keep wages high. At those high wages, employers wanted to employ fewer people than otherwise. We are about to suffer another small dose of Hoover economics.