Is this how a comptroller does his job?
On Monday, Scott Stringer issued a press release headlined “Comptroller Stringer urges raising the minimum wage in New York City to $13.13 per hour” (up from $8 per hour today).
Directly below was a sub-headline saying, “Over 1 million New York City residents would see wages rise by $100 a week.”
One teensy problem: Nowhere does our city comptroller include any estimate of the costs, much less who will pay them. He’s like the travel agent who shows you photos of a couple enjoying a champagne in their room at the Paris Ritz — and asks you to book a room without telling you the going rate starts at $1,200 a night.
Ditto for Stringer’s “analysis.” All he does is multiply. Any notion there might be a price he dismisses with a single phrase, saying that “empirical studies of minimum wage increases have not generally shown a measurable impact on employment.”
Leave aside that he must have looked at an awfully narrow set of empirical studies. The whole thing comes across as less a serious financial analysis than some late-night political justification that might have been written on a napkin at Stringer’s old bar, Uptown Local, before it went belly up.
Because if this is really all there is to jacking up the minimum wage — if no jobs are lost, no restaurants shut down, no low-skilled workers displaced by higher-skilled workers — if it’s all just a cost-free bonanza, why settle for so little?
Stringer rightly notes New York is America’s most expensive city.
What he doesn’t seem to get is that one big reason for that is a big government that continues to spend at a rate faster than worker incomes are rising.
Not to mention the high taxes and over-regulation and bureaucratic meddling that make New York far more expensive than it need be — for everyone.
Pretending that politicians can wave their magic wands and make workers more expensive to hire with no cost is bad enough. Far worse is that it comes from a man whose job is to watch over the city’s books.