Heidi Shierholz, chief economist of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, says the CBO overstated the number job losses. Its findings were partly based on its review of other studies on minimum wage hikes, and Shierholz says the agency should have given more weight to more reliable studies.
She also says that low-wage workers cycle in and out of the labor force so often that many who lose jobs because of a minimum wage increase could wind up earning more and working fewer hours in another position.
USA Today
July 9, 2019
But Heidi Shierholz of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute said in an online post that “an employment decline … doesn’t necessarily mean any worker is actually worse off.” That’s because, he wrote, “a sizeable share of low-wage workers routinely cycle in an out of employment.” Every three months, according to Shierholz, “more than 20 percent of the lowest-wage workers leave or start [a] job.”
Shierholz also said the CBO study “substantially overstates” how many jobs a $15 minimum wage would cost by failing to weight properly “the highest quality studies” on the matter, which show “small-to-no employment effects.”
Politico
July 9, 2019
But even the CBO included scenarios in which no jobs would be lost. Economic Policy Institute economist Ben Zipperer says it’s an acknowledgement that raising the minimum wage hasn’t proven to be as dangerous as researchers once feared. He added that the CBO’s median estimate nonetheless appears overly pessimistic.
The Washington Post
July 9, 2019
Heidi Shierholz, senior economist for the Economic Policy Institute, which supports increasing the minimum wage, said the report showed that “as a group, low-wage workers would be unambiguously better off.”
“The report finds that a $15 minimum wage would increase the wages of millions of low wage workers, increase the average incomes of low and lower-middle-income families, reduce poverty, shift money from corporate profits to the wages of low-wage workers, and reduce inequality,” she said in a statement.
The Washington Times
July 9, 2019
Heidi Shierholz, senior economist for the Economic Policy Institute, which supports increasing the minimum wage, said the report showed “as a group, low-wage workers would be unambiguously better off,” the Washington Times reported.
Newsmax
July 9, 2019
Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said she felt the CBO’s methodology exaggerates the effects of any job losses. But even taking the CBO’s projections at face value, “The benefits to low-wage workers far exceed the costs,” Shierholz said.
As Shierholz noted, the CBO projected that the number of people below the poverty line would fall by more than a million due to the wage increase.
Huffington Post
July 9, 2019
“CBO nevertheless substantially overstates the costs,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). “CBO finds that the policy would lead to a decline in employment of 1.3 million—though in choosing the parameters that resulted in that conclusion it failed to appropriately weight the highest quality studies in the vast academic literature on this issue.”
“As a result,” Shierholz added, “policymakers must be skeptical of their assessment of the employment impact, given that other careful reviews of the minimum wage literature have shown that the average study finds small-to-no employment effects of minimum wage increases.”
Common Dreams
July 9, 2019
Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute says she’s skeptical of that number. “There is a new consensus among economists that minimum wage increases have raised wages without substantial job loss.”
WVTF
July 9, 2019
The CBO report examined the impact of raising the federal minimum wage from its current point of $7.25. It was last raised in 2009, and last month marked the longest period in the nation’s history without any increase, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Other research from the Economic Policy Institute also shows that a single parent making $7.25 an hour to support their family through full-time work will come up around $1,815 short of crossing the 2017 federal poverty line of $16,895 for a single-parent family.
Business Insider
July 9, 2019
The current $7.25 minimum hourly rate was set in 2009, right in the middle of the Great Recession. Since then, America’s lowest-paid workers have lost about $3,000 a year when you consider the rising cost of living, according to calculations from the Economic Policy Institute.
Another meta-analysis comes in a highly anticipated study forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Economics by economists at the University of Massachusetts, University College London, and the Economic Policy Institute. They studied data from 138 cities and states that raised the minimum pay between 1979 and 2016. The conclusion is that low-wage workers received a 7 percent pay bump after a minimum wage law went into effect, but there was little or no change in employment. The study also showed that it would not cost jobs, even in states with large shares of minimum wage workers. The latest study by Godoey and Reich, which expands the analysis to the county level, supports those findings.
VOX
July 9, 2019