The evidence keeps adding up:
Raising the minimum wage is just fine for employment. Maybe even good! An analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research's Ben Wolcott finds there's been more employment growth in states that raised their minimum wages at the beginning of 2014 than in states that didn't:
Of the 13 states that increased their minimum wage in early 2014, all but one (New Jersey) are seeing employment gains. Furthermore, nine of the remaining 12 states are above the median for this period. The average change in employment for the 13 states that increased their minimum wage is +0.99% while the remaining states have an average employment change of +0.68%.
As Wolcott cautions, "this kind of simple exercise can't establish causality." But "it does provide evidence against theoretical negative employment effects of minimum-wage increases." In other words, it's one more piece of evidence that when Republicans squawk about raising the minimum wage being a jobs-killer, they're wrong. In fact, when you take it alongside falling unemployment in
San Jose and strong small business jobs growth in
Washington state after their minimum wages went up, it's getting really hard to say "raising the minimum wage is a job-killer" with a straight face. Or it would be, if the people saying it had any shame.