The CBO released its analysis of the employment and budgetary effects of minimum wage increase yesterday. Advocates from both sides of the isle will seize on the reports findings to “prove their point” about the (de)merits of increasing the minimum wage. I found Jared Bernstein’s Economix blog on the subject pretty even-handed:

It is important to recognize that there is a very wide range of estimates from which the budget agency can choose, as shown in the chart below, which plots results of the employment effect from dozens of studies (from a recent set of slides from the White House Council of Economic Advisers).  This wide range does not imply that the budget office made a mistake, though it looks to me as if it applied a higher job-loss estimate than is the current consensus among economists who’ve closely studied the issue.

As the chart shows, the employment impact from this “meta-analysis” clumps around zero, which is why the report finds that the policy is a significant net plus from the perspective of low-wage workers: Many more workers get a raise from the policy than are displaced from their jobs.

In fact, the study points out that the range, or confidence interval, around their central estimate ranges from a “very slight decrease” to one million.  The authors guess that there’s a two-thirds chance that the true estimate is in that range.

There is no policy I can think of that generates only benefits without any costs, and policy makers always have to weigh the two sides. In the case of the minimum wage, on the benefits side of ledger, the budget office shows that 16.5 million low-wage workers would directly get a much-needed pay increase at no cost to the federal budget.

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There is one paragraph of the report Bernstein does not seize on, which I believe merits greater consideration:

An increase in the minimum wage also affects the
employment of low-wage workers in the short term
through changes in the economy-wide demand for goods
and services. A higher minimum wage shifts income from
higher-wage consumers and business owners to low-wage
workers. Because those low-wage workers tend to spend a
larger fraction of their earnings, some firms see increased
demand for their goods and services, boosting the
employment of low-wage workers and higher-wage
workers alike. That effect is larger when the economy is
weaker, and it is larger in regions of the country where
the economy is weaker. (p. 7)

The positive employment effect of increasing the minimum wage (redistributing money to lower income individuals who, by definition, spend a greater share of every dollar earned; i.e. people who have a higher “marginal propensity to consume”) is “larger when the economy is weaker“.

Can there be any question that the economy is currently very weak? Specifically, aggregate demand is most depressed for the poorest, who have seen decreases in real household income over the past decade(s) (as opposed to the wealthiest 1%, who have captured 95% of income gains since 2009).

It is, therefore, quite reasonable to assume that job losses will be closer to the “very slight decrease” end of the CBO range, if indeed they are negative at all (an assumption that is directly in line with “the current consensus of economists who have studied the issue closely”).

The other findings of the report are fairly straightforward: 16.5 million workers will benefit from a $10.10 minimum wage by 2016, 900,000 will be raised out of poverty, with negligible effects on the federal budget:

“CBO concludes that the net effect on the federal
budget of raising the minimum wage would probably be
a small decrease in budget deficits for several years but a
small increase in budget deficits thereafter.” (p. 14)

Given that any budget forecast after “several years from now” borders on divination, one can even conclude that raising the minimum wage would actually result in a net gain for the federal budget. Spending on automatic stabilizers will fall (automatically) as poorer families / individuals rise above certain income thresholds. On the other hand, lower tax revenues are estimated to come from wealthier individuals, whom tend to find ways to have an effective tax rates below what their income bracket would suggest. In other words, spending cuts will occur automatically, while drops in tax revenue are considering tax revenues that may never have been realized in the first place.

As Mr. Bernstein concluded, no policy change is without trade-offs. However, it seems pretty clear that, in the current context, the benefits of increasing the minimum wage far outweigh the losses. So when you hear conservative politicians beating the “1,000,000 jobs lost drum” and/or the “increasing the deficit drum” over the next few  months, question whether that estimate is reasonable or simply an attempt to turn public support against a common sense policy reform.