Three Safeguards to Ease the Mind of $15 Minimum Wage Critics

Advocates of raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour have the upper hand in the debate. Skeptics raise some good points, but all of their concerns can be addressed with simple tweaks to the policy.

When people argue about the minimum wage, they usually talk about whether or not it kills jobs. Economists used to think a minimum wage would create a lot of unemployment by driving a wedge between supply and demand. But over the past 30 years, a veritable mountain of high-quality economic evidence has confirmed that this rarely if ever happens, at least in the short term. The most likely reason is that most labor markets are dominated at least to some extent by powerful employers, so that supply and demand aren’t really governing the market in the first place. As a result, economists have become much more favorable to the minimum wage, with opinions roughly evenly split on the $15 number as far back as 2015.