Is Capitalism Moral?

African-American economist Walter Williams - simple and brilliant:

The hidden history of the minimum wage in America

Mark J. Perry is concurrently a scholar at AEI and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan's Flint campus. He is best known as the creator and editor of the popular economics blog Carpe Diem. At AEI, Perry writes about economic and financial issues for American.com and the AEIdeas blog.

Don [George Mason University economics professor Don Boudreaux] has emphasized a very important, but usually overlooked or neglected reason that some empirical studies fail to find negative employment effects following increases in the minimum wage government-mandated wage floor that guarantees reduced employment opportunities for America’s teenagers and low-skilled workers (especially minorities). That reason has to do with the fact that the minimum wage has been in effect for almost 80 years since the Fair Unfair to Unskilled Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938, and it’s been increased 27 times since then. Therefore, the government’s mandated market-suppressing, artificial wage for low- and un-skilled workers has been around for such a long time, and it’s been raised so many times, that the distortionary effects of the minimum wage have long ago been “internalized” by employers who hire unskilled workers.

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The ACA’s overall impact on employment, however, will arguably be larger than that of any single piece of legislation since World War II.

Much of the ACA’s tax effect resembles unemployment insurance: both encourage layoffs and discourage people from returning to work.

Starting this year, the United States’ working population will face three major employment disincentives resulting from the very benefits the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides: (1) an explicit tax on full-time work, (2) an implicit tax on full-time work for those who are ineligible for the ACA’s health insurance subsidies, and (3) an implicit tax that links the amount of available subsidies to workers’ incomes.

A new study published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University advances the understanding of how much these ACA taxes will reduce overall employment, and why. It concludes that the reduction will be nearly double that projected by previous analyses. Labor markets ultimately will reduce weekly employment per person by about 3 percent—translating to roughly 4 million fewer full-time-equivalent workers.

Below is a brief summary of this important update. Please see “The Affordable Care Act and the New Economics of Part-Time Work” to read the entire study and to learn more about author Casey B. Mulligan, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.

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