Not Proof But Indicative Of LA's Job Losses From The $15 Minimum Wage

By Tim Worstall of Forbes. Excerpt:

"Back a while when LA City announced that it was going to raise its minimum wage to $15 I noted one of the reports that had been made to the City Council about the effects of doing so. Which was that there would be a reduction in the number of jobs in LA City. Do note this report wasn’t from some horrible free market loon like myself, rather it came from Michael Reich and his colleagues at Berkeley. And it recommended that the rise went ahead even though there would be such job losses. And yes, their report did include the effects of more spending being done as the working stiffs tend to spend all of their income, richer people not so much. And yet still it showed job losses:

These effects on the level of economic activity correspond to a cumulative net reduction in employment in Los Angeles City of 1,552 jobs by 2017 and 3,472 jobs by 2019, or 0.1 and 0.2 percent of all employment, respectively.

So, even from this official report we expect job losses as a result of a rise in the minimum wage. And now on to something ever so slightly different. LA City also passed a law stating that hotel workers should get higher wages. Hotel workers specifically and only, on a much faster timescale than the more general minimum wage rise. So, given what we know already, given what we know about the effects of minimum wage rises in general, what would we expect to happen? Yup, we’d expect to see job losses.

Please do note that the research showing not much effect of moderate minimum wage rises does in fact say that. We have absolutely no research whatsoever that says there will be no unemployment effects from large minimum wage rises. All we have is a series of highly disputed papers that show that the effects of moderate rises are, at best, not very much. The disputation coming from the fact that we’ve got an equal number, if not more, of similar studies showing that the effects of moderate minimum wage rises are indeed moderate and negative, that is they cause unemployment.

So, given this, what do we expect among the employment of hotel workers in LA City as a result of a large rise in the minimum wage? Yup, unemployment effects:

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