Minimum Wage Hurts Workers It’s Supposed to Help

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE

P
resident Biden and his fellow Democrats are pushing hard to increase the federal minimum wage to $15, and polls show strong support for the measure. That’s understandable — after all, who doesn’t care about poor people and want them to do better?

The problem is that Americans don’t fully understand how the minimum wage works, or the many ways it hurts the very people it’s supposed to help. As the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) notes in a new review of the relevant academic studies, the economic consensus on minimum-wage laws is much clearer, and much more clearly negative, than …