Tag: Minimum Wage

Misconceptions: Raising the Minimum Wage Does Not Automatically Lead to Inflation

In recent weeks, I have had the very same conversation with a number of my friends. Each time I’m told that they were participating in a discussion about the minimum wage when someone claimed that there was no point in raising wages because firms would just raise their prices to cover the increase. This is a very intuitive, appealing argument, but it’s deeply misleading and fallacious. Let me explain why.

Continue reading “Misconceptions: Raising the Minimum Wage Does Not Automatically Lead to Inflation” →

Candidate Evaluations: Rick Perry

Rick Perry has joined the race for president, so here goes another candidate evaluation. I’ll be evaluating Perry’s background, policy history, and explicit statements to determine whether or not he would make a good president. I won’t be paying attention to electability or likeability, as is often common elsewhere on the web.

Continue reading “Candidate Evaluations: Rick Perry” →

Candidate Evaluations: Rick Santorum

The list of presidential candidates has expanded again–Rick Santorum has decided to join the mess. This forces me to return to the Candidate Evaluations series, where we examine a US presidential candidate’s background, policy history, and explicit statements in an attempt to figure out whether the candidate would actually be any good at being president, rather than focusing on electability or likeability, as is common in the mainstream press. When I started this series, I did not imagine I would be made to do so many of these, but here we go again. Continue reading “Candidate Evaluations: Rick Santorum” →

Why You Should Get a Raise

Since the global economic crisis of 2008, many of the world’s advanced economies continue to struggle to recover. In many of these countries, growth since the crisis has been much slower than it was in the years prior. Indeed, when we look closely, we see that the 2004-2007 growth average is higher than the 2010-2013 average in just about all the major advanced economies, and that in some countries this difference is very large:

Slowing GDP Growth

What’s holding back recovery? To understand this, we need to understand what kind of economic crisis we’re trying to recover from in the first place. Continue reading “Why You Should Get a Raise” →