fb-pixelCritics of Obama’s bid to hike wage have done their homework - The Boston Globe Skip to main content
letters

Critics of Obama’s bid to hike wage have done their homework

A Globe editorial dismisses our criticism of 600 wage- hike-supporting economists as “astonishingly clumsy” (“Minimum wage: Karl Marx favored it, too,” March 12). Seeing as the ad merited a news story in the paper and a follow-up commentary on the editorial page, I suspect the editorial board simply lacked a compelling response to our argument.

The president has relied on this list to bolster his case for a nearly 40 percent bump in the minimum wage. In light of a Congressional Budget Office report that finds substantial job loss associated with the president’s plan, the least we can do is assess the credibility of a list of economists who say otherwise.

Backed by more than 5,000 pages of sourcing documents, our analysis finds that nearly half the signers lack experience in labor economics.

In addition, more than 70 of the signers — hardly “a few,” as the Globe suggests — are either full-time staffers at labor union-backed organizations or specialists in radical economic studies, such as Marxism.

Advertisement



Many of these researchers proudly embrace their heterodox beliefs, and it’s amusing to watch them take umbrage at their own words. They’re free to cling to failed economic ideas, just as we’re free to point out that they’re not credible advocates for a cost-free minimum wage hike.

Michael Saltsman
Research director

Employment Policies Institute

Washington