President Biden claimed during his Super Bowl interview that “all the economics show” that if the government imposes a $15 minimum wage then “the whole economy rises.” For his part, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has claimed for years that “[t]here’s just no evidence that raising the minimum wage costs jobs, at least when the starting point is as low as it is in modern America.” Is this really possible? Are all of the free market fans on the internet just spouting unscientific nonsense when they argue that a minimum wage hike will hurt unskilled workers?
The quick answer is no; Biden and Krugman are wrong. Although the empirical evidence regarding the minimum wage is not the slam dunk it once was, the studies that find a modest impact on employment couch their results in terms of a