Michael Bloomberg just gave New York’s politicians a timely lesson on the minimum wage — even though he was talking about cigarettes.
This week the mayor introduced yet another measure to curb smoking. He’s asking the City Council to pass a law that would mean no one could charge less than $10.50 for a pack of cigarettes, which is designed to raise the price for some discount brands. The economic assumption is straightforward: Make something more expensive and people will buy less of it.
Given the undeniable health risks from smoking and the widespread public disapproval of the habit, this Bloomberg bid is likely to find more favor than his soda ban. For argument’s sake, we’ll leave aside the complication of the thriving black market in cigarettes — created by high city and state taxes that already make the cost of smokes higher here than in other states.
So our question is this: If a higher price for cigarettes means fewer cigarette sales, won’t higher prices for labor mean fewer jobs?
Specifically, any politician who signs on to Bloomberg’s bid to reduce smoking by raising the price of a pack of cigarettes to $10.50 should be asked whether he or she also supports Albany’s hike in the state minimum wage to $9 an hour from $7.25.
We’d sure like to hear them explain how the same laws of pricing that will reduce cigarette sales won’t, when it comes to a higher minimum wage, take the form of employers hiring fewer workers, reducing the hours of the workers they have or hiring workers off the books.
We’d bet the 9.1 percent of New York City workers who are unemployed would be even more interested in that answer.