The Washington Post, July 8, 2019: It’s not just paychecks: The surprising society-wide benefits of raising the minimum wage
The central question in the minimum-wage debate has shifted. Where economists once asked, “Will raising the wage floor kill jobs?” they now ask, “Just how transformative could a higher minimum wage be?”
They can move onto bigger questions now that new, high-quality research has pushed economists to acknowledge that raising the minimum wage hasn’t, in recent decades, destroyed jobs by making workers too expensive.
But there’s a notable holdout. On Monday afternoon, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that raising the minimum wage to the $15 level proposed by many Democratic candidates could cost 1.3 million jobs, while raising the earnings of 27.3 million workers.
