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The U.S. Army has a recruitment problem. In 2022, the service missed recruitment goals by 25% — the only armed service to do so. Now, the Army is bringing back a marketing campaign from the ’80s and ’90s in the hope that the rebranding can help bridge the gap.

The Army launched its “Be All You Can Be” campaign in March with a price tag of $117 million. Shortly afterward came the arrest of actor Jonathan Majors, who was featured in two marquee ads. The ads were pulled, and two new ones took their place.

After 2009, recruiting conditions improved. The economy stalled as a result of the Great Recession that began in fall 2008, thereby improving the attractiveness of Army service relative to recruits’ opportunities in the civilian workplace. Research shows an increase in high-quality enlistments when the unemployment rate rises (Asch et al., 2010; Knapp et al., 2018). The strong relationship between the strength of the economy and high-quality recruits is shown in Figure 4.7 In addition, the number of Army deployments fell markedly after 2010, and the Army accession mission began to decline as did the overall enlisted force size. Military pay, as measured by regular military compensation (RMC), was also relatively constant from 2010 to 2016 (Hosek et al., 2018).

<<Figure 3 Omitted>>

In the mellow singsong of the California surfer patois that adds an oddly cheerful flavor to his momentous decision, he explains: "I have a little girl, so I had to think about her and the possibility of never coming back to her. At the same time you've got to pay your bills and you've got to keep living." Counter is among thousands of Americans hit hard by the financial crisis who are finding financial refuge in the military, where in spite of the stark prospect of going to war, the work is steady and the pay and benefits are decent.

Economic hard times are a driving force in what the Department of Defense is calling the best recruitment year since 1973.

"Calling the Army recruiting shortfall a crisis is like saying that the Titanic had a 'small' problem in its crossing of the Atlantic," Ferrari and Kem wrote.

Rose Riley, spokesperson for the U.S. Air Force, told Newsweek that the branch had made its recruitment goals for the 2022 fiscal year by "a narrow margin" but weekly accessions continue to fall short in 2023.

From the Suwalki Gap to the Taiwan Strait, the US military faces no shortage of potential crises. But perhaps its biggest challenge lies close to home: A dwindling number of Americans are able and willing to serve in uniform. To maintain the military’s edge, the Pentagon needs to rethink how it recruits and retains troops — while also preparing to fight future wars with a leaner active-duty force.

On current trends, the outlook is troubling. To meet its overall goal of an active-duty force of 1.3 million, the military needs to bring in roughly 150,000 new recruits across its six service branches. With two months left in the fiscal year, the Pentagon is still 15% short of that goal, with the largest service, the Army, facing the biggest shortfall. Through the end of June, the Army had signed up 22,000 troops, 60% below its annual target. It could end the year with as few as 445,000 troops, nearly 40,000 smaller than the force size authorized by Congress.

WASHINGTON – The Army faces the worst recruiting environment since the all-volunteer force was created in 1973. The result: The service won't make its goal for recruits and faces a shrinking force in a dangerous world.

Army recruiting typically suffers when civilian jobs are plentiful. That trend is evident this year with the 3.6% unemployment rate, a figure just above a 50-year low. But new factors have dampened recruiting efforts, experts say, including Americans' new attitudes toward work-life balance formed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

That argument about productivity has become increasingly popular since then as more countries contemplate higher wage floors. It is easy to see the allure in the notion that one good thing (better pay for those at the bottom) can lead to another (a stronger economy overall). The idea is that if employers are no longer able to rely on cheap labour, they will have to invest more in capital or increase workforce productivity with better technology or training. It also has some empirical support. One paper has found that Germany’s minimum wage increased productivity after its introduction in 2015, albeit by driving some smaller companies out of business. But the British experiment has not stuck to the script. A review by the Low Pay Commission last week concluded the policy “did not improve productivity”. Industries and areas with a higher share of minimum wage workers did not experience faster productivity growth, relative to other areas, after the policy was introduced in 2016. Why didn’t it work out? Surveys of employers showed they were keen to boost productivity initially, but their enthusiasm faded over time. More decided to simply accept lower profits or charge higher prices. Smaller companies, in particular, struggled to find money to invest. In surveys by the Federation of Small Businesses, the third most common response to the rising minimum wage was actually to cut or cancel investment as a way to cope with higher costs. The LPC review said some companies which did invest found the technology they used was inflexible or disliked by customers. When I was reporting on the introduction of the higher minimum wage in 2016, I was struck by how many employers said they would make staff work harder rather than smarter. One hotel owner told me he would make the cleaners do more rooms per hour, for example. An employer survey in 2019 bore this out: 25 per cent of respondents had asked staff to do more tasks (the most popular “productivity-related” response) compared with 11 per cent which had automated tasks. But this is a poor man’s version of productivity growth. It might work for a while, but people can only work so hard before they burn out or deliver a worse quality product or service. Low-paid work in the UK is already more stressful than it used to be. The share of employees who report that their work is “always” or “often” stressful rose from 30 per cent in 1989 to 38 per cent in 2015, according to the Resolution Foundation think-tank. But for people in jobs such as driving or care, the proportion has risen from 18 to 41 per cent. Higher pay at the bottom has also compressed the wage ladder in some companies. Employers interviewed by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development said smaller pay differences between entry-level and supervisor jobs was making it harder to persuade workers to take on more training and responsibility. “What we get reported back is people saying, ‘I’m taking on all this extra responsibility, and that person who has just joined us in a lower-skilled role is on the same pay scale as me. Why should I bother?’” explained one executive at a leisure company with 3,400 staff. None of this is to say Osborne’s minimum wage policy has been a failure. It successfully raised pay for people at the bottom of the labour market without causing high unemployment — a feat some economists doubted would be possible. The 50/10 ratio of pay — a measure of wage inequality for the bottom half of workers — fell by more between 2015 and 2019 than in the previous 17 years. Minimum wages can put more money into the hands of workers who need it and will spend it. They can help address concerns about fairness and inequality. But these undeniable achievements aren’t completely costless. And they are not guaranteed to transform a country’s productivity growth, at least not when other trends and policy choices pull in the opposite direction. Spending on adult education in England, for example, was cut 49 per cent between 2009 and 2019. If Britain is to be a “high pay, high productivity” economy, it will need more than the minimum wage to get there.

Minimum-wage workers won't see a raise as part of federal coronavirus relief efforts, as moderate Democrats joined all Republicans to shoot down Senator Bernie Sanders' amendment to include increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour in the Senate COVID relief package. The 42-58 vote laid out a deep divide within the Democratic caucus on the issue, raising questions on its path forward — but Democratic lawmakers who favor the move say the fight is far from over. "If any senator believes this is the last time they will cast a vote on whether or not to give a raise to 32 million Americans, they are sorely mistaken," Sanders said in a statement. "We're going to keep bringing it up, and we're going to get it done because it is what the American people demand and need." Sanders offered the amendment after Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that a $15 minimum wage hike cannot be included in the Senate COVID relief package under the budget reconciliation process. In that process, legislation can advance with a simple majority instead of 60 votes, but the legislation has to follow strict budgetary rules. "I think the parliamentarian was dead wrong," said Sanders, speaking on the Senate floor Friday morning. "But more importantly, it is an absurd process that we allow an unelected staffer, somebody who works for the Senate, not elected by anybody, to make a decision as to whether 30 million Americans get a pay raise or not." The amendment had a difficult path to getting adopted after moderate Senate Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona signaled their opposition to raising the minimum wage to $15. Democratic Senators Jon Tester of Montana, Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, and Tom Carper and Chris Coons of Delaware, along with Sinema and Manchin, joined Republicans against the motion. Independent Angus King of Maine, who caucuses with Democrats, also voted against the motion. While all senators have voted, the vote has not yet technically closed.

President Biden’s push to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour faces significant hurdles in Congress because of strong opposition from Republicans, skepticism from some centrist Democrats, as well as obscure Senate procedures.

Biden proposed the $15-an-hour minimum wage hike in his $1.9 trillion stimulus plan, which congressional lawmakers are starting to debate. Republicans are expected to oppose the measure. If Biden wants bipartisan support for his overall stimulus proposal, he would probably be forced to jettison the wage hike.

As is probably clear, I am more sympathetic to the second school of thinking about technology and jobs. While the threat of automation may focus the mind, it seems to me far more likely that advanced technology is harming workers through a thousand smaller, different cuts. Lower communications and monitoring costs make outsourcing, subcontracting, and offshoring easier, severing the legal and social links between firms and their workers. Big data analytics help retailers predict the bare minimum their suppliers will accept for goods, driving down profits and workers’ wages. The network effects in two-sided market platforms give firms such as Uber enormous power to drive down compensation for drivers or to terminate them without due process. Background checks can uncover minor criminal histories or financial difficulties that eliminate applicants from consideration. Algorithmic scheduling leaves baristas and fast food workers without predictable hours. And all this plays out against the backdrop of globalized trade and investment, financialization, and the erosion of the welfare state, all of which shift market risks to workers.

The result is that those with jobs are increasingly divided into haves and have-nots. The haves include those in the professions along with a small number of well-compensated managers at leading firms who develop production strategies. The have-nots comprise a growing number of freelance knowledge workers hired on a project-by-project basis and an enormous number of less skilled service workers. The have-nots are losing out along multiple axes: they lack decent compensation and reasonable hours; their work is precarious; and they have no formal representation in the workplace or the economy. Needless to say, women, people of color, non-citizens, and the poor suffer the most. Panic over automation just makes matters worse, allowing brick-and-mortar firms to resist worker demands for higher wages or paid sick leave: if workers start to ask for too much, the market reasoning goes, robots will look more and more attractive. The future of work is already here, in other words, and it looks grim.

The power of each individual to say yes or no to a job, a power closely related to the notion of real freedom, has been present in the advocacy of basic income from its inception. Thus, in his 1871 Catéchisme Populaire (Populist Catechism), Joseph Charlier described the crucial advantage of the unconditional income for which he advocated: “It is no longer the worker who will have to bow before capital, it is capital, reduced to its true role of collaborating agent, that will have to negotiate with labor on an equal footing.” Rogers agrees that a basic income helps protect the worker, but insists on the need for a powerful regulatory state and thinks it is critical to preserve and enhance arrangements such as minimum wage and collective bargaining rights. One might speculate about the “real-libertarian” legitimacy of various constraints on the labor market when an unconditional income is in place at the highest sustainable level. But as we explain in our book, all real-life basic income proposals are fully consistent with minimum wage legislation and active trade unions. There are, however, a number of trends—such as the shrinking of firm size or the expansion of part-time work and self-employment—that reduce the effectiveness of these traditional ways of correcting the balance of power in capitalist societies, and therefore increase the importance of empowering workers with a wider set of options, outside and inside the labor market, which is what a basic income does.

Beyond some minimal conditions, such as a safe work site, it is very difficult for labor market regulators—whether legislators, bureaucrats, or experts—to distinguish good and bad jobs. There are so many crucial factors that are very hard for them to track: the quality of the relationship between workers and their bosses and colleagues; how much the job enables workers to learn and improve their prospects; whether new technology is used to reduce discretion rather than facilitate work; how convenient the job is in terms of location and schedule; and how close the job is to the great passion of a worker’s life. The workers themselves are best placed to assess these various dimensions and an unconditional basic income gives them the power to give up more easily a lousy job and accept more easily a job that may pay little or irregularly but possesses redeeming features. For this reason, it can be argued that a basic income would not only help accommodate but also encourage the growth of precarious jobs, but not of just any precarious job. A basic income empowers those who possess the relevant information, namely the workers themselves, who tend to know far more than anyone else both about the jobs concerned and about their own situations, capacities, and ambitions.

Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, as President Joe Biden has proposed, would cost 1.4 million jobs over the next four years while lifting 900,000 people out of poverty, according to a Congressional Budget Office report Monday. The impact on the employment rolls is slightly higher than the 1.3 million employment estimate from a 2019 report from the CBO, a nonpartisan agency that provides budgetary analysis to Congress. The number has been disputed by employment advocates who cite the benefits from the raise and say businesses will be able to handle the costs. Biden has acknowledged that the plan to phase in the new federal wage floor likely won’t make it through the $1.9 trillion spending plan he is pushing through Congress, though he remains committed to the increase. The CBO report estimates that the employment reduction would happen by 2025 and come as employers cut payroll to compensate for the increased costs. Along with the reduction in employment, the federal budget deficit would increase by $54 billion over the next 10 years, a fairly negligible level considering the fiscal 2020 shortfall totaled more than $3 trillion. The merits of a higher minimum wage Pay for all workers would increase by a net $333 billion, “an increased labor cost for firms considerably larger than the net effect on the budget deficit during that period,” the CBO report said. In the 2019 estimate, the agency said total family income would decrease slightly on net. “Higher wages would increase the cost to employers of producing goods and services,” the report said. “Employers would pass some of those increased costs on to consumers in the form of higher prices, and those higher prices, in turn, would lead consumers to purchase fewer goods and services,” the report found. “Employers would consequently produce fewer goods and services, and as a result, they would tend to reduce their employment of workers at all wage levels.”

When it comes to measuring how a minimum wage affects employment, the simple answers are wrong. For example, one simple approach is to can look at employment before and after a minimum wage increase, but if a recession occurs along the way, surely one would not want to attribute the resulting job changes that to minimum wage increases. Also, it's understandably easier for politicians to pass minimum wage increases when the economy is growing, but you wouldn't want to mix up an overall climate of economic growth with the effects of a minimum wage increase, either.

Ideally, you would come up with several other and more plausible methods for isolating the effects of a minimum wage increase, so that you could compare results across these methods. What I want to do here is to describe first how such a study might be done, but not reveal the results here at the start. After all, you aren't the sort of person who would judge the methods of a study by whether the results confirmed your previous biases, are you? No, I'm sure you're not. Instead, you're the kind of person who thinks first whether the method of the study makes sense, and then to the extent that it does, you will put a corresponding degree of belief on the results.

Instead, America needs a bold alternative policy that is inclusive and progressive, rather than one that further moves us towards deeper inequalities. One such bold policy is a federal job guarantee. The idea is straightforward: the government would ensure that everyone have access to a job with non-poverty wages and benefits, including health insurance. Similar to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression, a job guarantee would provide socially useful goods and services, and much needed investment in both our physical and human infrastructure. While the history of New Deal employment programs brings forth images of bridges, roads, dams, and national parks, a modern-day job corps can do even more and aid us in creating a cutting edge 21st century economy. Undoubtedly physical infrastructure investment is important, especially given the United States’ infrastructure D+ grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Beyond traditional infrastructure, the program can be mobilized to speed the transition to a green economy; provide for our human infrastructure by, for example, dignifying child care and elder care work with a formal wage, rejuvenate and reinvent the postal service with postal basic banking services, and invest in the human spirit via arts and cultural services. The benefits of such a program are wide ranging, reaching far beyond those directly employed by it. Everyone will benefit from improved infrastructure and better child care. Our crumbling infrastructure alone costs businesses and the country billions a year, not to mention the average American family loses about $3,400 in disposable income per year from infrastructure-related problems. By eliminating low-wage jobs, we can reduce dramatically the $152.8 billion per year the public spends in supporting low-wage employment. And the savings gained from mobilizing the workforce to push us toward a resource conserving, green economy could extend across generations. The job guarantee, moreover, could solve another problem beyond unemployment: working poverty. Having a job is not enough to exit poverty. Many are condemned to poverty despite working full time. A 2016 study by Lonnie Goldman indicates that millions of Americans involuntarily work part time as their employers cut corners—and benefits—to boost their profits. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), minimum wage laws, living wage ordinances, Medicare and Medicaid, Supplemental and Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP), and others have profoundly increased the economic well-being of millions of hardworking Americans. But these programs have proven far from sufficient to ensure that all hard-working Americans do not go home in poverty. For example, while the EITC has been shown to reduce poverty, economist Jesse Rothstein’s work found that part of the subsidy is captured by employers as the program puts downward pressure on wages. By subsidizing low-wage employment rather than eliminating poverty-level wages, the EITC marginally improves living standards, bypassing the millions who remain unemployed. The current $7.25 federal minimum wage also falls far short of lifting millions of Americans out of poverty, or, worse, does not address the millions of workers who are unemployed or discouraged from looking for work altogether. At that level, no minimum wage employee can meet their basic needs, including affordable housing. Even if policymakers and activists achieved their goal in the “Fight for $15” movement, the mandated wage floor will not protect those without a job or those whose employers hire them for such limited work hours that they cannot escape poverty. A guaranteed jobs program, however, would solve this conundrum. By setting the entry wage at $24,600 a year, the poverty line for a family of four, a job guarantee program could provide a path out of poverty for millions of Americans. The program could offer full-time or part-time work – whatever fits the workers’ needs. In addition, the program would provide adequate health care coverage and other benefits for all full-time workers, comparable to benefits offered to civil servants.

The authors allege that "it is doubtful whether there is any more important condition of individual and general well being than the possibility of obtaining an income sufficient to enable those who earn it [*57] to secure … the necessaries of life." 261 This thesis is both presumptive and credulous: presumptive because the authors' claim assumes facts not in evidence, 262 and credulous because they seem to have been misled by their own presumptions. The pertinent question becomes whether low wage beneficiaries of minimum wage regimes are actually poor or, alternatively put, whether they receive the benefits that minimum wage advocates allege. To answer such questions, it is important to appreciate that not every worker within a family needs to earn a sufficiently high wage in order to secure all of the necessaries of life since family members may cross-subsidize one another for a variety of reasons. 263 Contrary to Deakin and Wilkinson's supple claims, the legal and economics literature shows that most of the actual (as opposed to theoretical) beneficiaries of wage minimums in the United States do not live in low-income households, nor are they the primary breadwinners for their families. 264 Thus, it is easy to see why neoclassical economics "is hostile to minimum wage legislation and to labour standards more generally, seeing them as an unwarranted interference with the operation of the market and a cause of unemployment" and human misery. 265 Furthermore, these results may be reinforced by regressive distributional consequences. While it is important to note that poverty includes more than economic considerations, which imply that minimum wages or earned-income tax credits cannot alleviate all forms of impoverishment, 266 it is also worth noting that "neoclassical competitive models of firm behavior predict that wage increases reduce the quantity of labor demanded by firms and … that the least valued workers are the first fired or the last hired." 267

Since adducible data shows that the primary beneficiaries of wage- [*58] rate minima are not necessarily members of poor households, 268 two observations emerge. First, such data is consistent with the orthodox economics consensus suggesting that marginalized workers (and not teenagers or young adults) living in middle-class or upper-middle-class families are placed within the crosshairs by ongoing attempts to raise wage minima. Second, and equally important, if the primary beneficiaries are members of relatively affluent families, it is doubtful that Deakin and Wilkinson's objective of providing a living wage to workers is achievable through statutory wage regulation, notwithstanding the existence of some data that shows that living wage ordinances, in contradistinction to minimum wage increases, may help to achieve modest reductions in urban poverty, despite their strong negative effect on employment. 269

Finally, this research turns to estimating the minimum wages' distributional effects on household net incomes using the model from Equation (2). This part of the research aims to test whether the relative size of the minimum wage—measured using the same two-bite statistics—has a significant positive effect on the mean income earned by individuals located up to and including a particular percentile of the family income distribution. The results as seen in Table 4 include states from all three bite areas (Low, Med, and High). Due to potential issues regarding parallel trends when including the High bite states, the same model is also analyzed excluding those states and these results can be found in Table 5 in Appendix B. Based on our model, the minimum wage does not appear to decrease inequality by lifting the incomes of individuals located in the bottom half of the income distribution. Instead, it appears that the minimum wage's bite –measured both using the Fraction and Kaitz index—has a negative but insignificant effect on the mean household wage earned by people in this lower half of the family income distribution. Therefore, this research does not find evidence to reject the null hypothesis that there is no effect of the minimum wage on the mean family income of households located in the bottom 50% of the family income distribution.

Similar to the results described above for individuals located in the lower half of the family income distribution, it also appears that the size of the minimum wage's bite has a negative and statistically insignificant effect on the mean family income earned by individuals located in the bottom 20% of the family income distribution. Therefore, similar to the minimum wage’s effect on households located in the bottom half of the distribution, this research cannot reject the null hypothesis that there is no effect of the minimum wage on the mean family income of households located in the bottom 20% of the family income distribution. Furthermore, when applying the model from Equation (2) to the income earned by the bottom 10% of the household income distribution, this paper finds that the implementation of the minimum wage may have a negative short-run effect on the mean level of household income earned by this part of the income distribution: When measuring the bite of the regulation via the Kaitz index, it appears that a one percentage point increase in the fraction of minimum wage to the regional mean wage decreases income earned by the lowest decile decreased by 0.29%

A large number of recent studies explore the effects of minimum wage increases on poverty, the vast majority of which find little evidence that the minimum wage is an effective antipoverty tool [8]. An emerging literature also finds little evidence that minimum wages are effective at reducing consumption-based deprivation, or material hardship [9]. But could the poverty effects of minimum wages differ over the business cycle?

It is argued that many poor individuals do not work and, therefore, will not directly benefit from minimum wage increases. And many more poor individuals will be unemployed during recessions, which will further undermine the poverty-alleviating effects of minimum wages during downturns. In addition, many poor (or near poor) workers earn hourly wages greater than newly proposed minimum wage levels and hence will also not directly benefit from such increases; their poverty status is more often the result of low work hours or living in a large family. For example, nearly 50% of poor workers in the US earn wages above a proposed $10.10 minimum wage [10].

Advocates of higher minimum wages often cite helping poor families as the primary motive for raising its value. They argue that families primarily supported by low-wage earnings will receive a substantial portion of the benefits and, moreover, that increasing minimum wages imposes very little public or social cost. Supporters contend that employment impacts experienced by low-wage workers are small, if any at all, and the pass-through of labor costs to prices induces negligible changes.

Using data from SIPP and CES for the year 1996, the exercise described in this paper simulates the distributional impacts of the rise in the federal minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.15 implemented in 1996–97; in 2010 dollars, this increase corresponds to a change from $5.91 to $7.00. Following the assumptions maintained by advocates, the simulation presumes ðiÞ that low-wage workers earned this higher wage with no change in their employment or any reduction in other forms of compensation, ðiiÞ that these higher labor costs were fully passed on to consumers through higher prices, and ðiiiÞ that consumers simply paid the extra amount for the goods produced by low-wage labor with no change in their quantities purchased. The cost of this increase is about $15 billion, which was nearly half the amount spent by the federal government on such antipoverty programs as the federal EITC, AFDC/TANF, or food stamp program. The analysis assesses the extent to which various categories of families benefit from higher earnings and the amounts that these groups pay more as consumers through higher prices. Combining these two sides yields a picture of who gains and who pays for minimum wage increases, including the net effects for families.

So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages? Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment. This is one reason why 72 percent of US-based economists oppose a federal minimum wage of $15.00 per hour. In 2015, the Employment Policies Institute surveyed 166 economists in the United States on the subject. They found: Nearly three-quarters of these US-based economists oppose a federal minimum wage of $15.00 per hour. The majority of surveyed economists believe a $15.00 per hour minimum wage will have negative effects on youth employment levels (83%), adult employment levels (52%), and the number of jobs available (76%). When economists were asked what effect a $15.00 per hour minimum wage will have on the skill level of entry-level positions, 8 out of 10 economists (80%) believe employers will hire entry-level positions with greater skills. When economists were asked what effect a $15.00 per hour minimum wage will have on small businesses with fewer than 50 employees, nearly 7 out of 10 economists (67%) believe it would make it harder for them to stay in business. A majority of surveyed economists (71%) believe that the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a very efficient way to address the income needs of poor families; only five percent believe a $15.00 per hour minimum wage would be very efficient. The economists surveyed are divided on the impact a $15.00 per hour minimum wage will have on poverty rates, as well as the impact it would have on the spending level for public programs such as the EITC, TANF, or others. At lower levels (under $11.00 per hour) of proposed federal minimum wages, economists are divided largely by self-identified party identification as to an acceptable rate with a majority of Republicans and Independents who responded favoring lower minimum wages ($7.50 per hour or less) and a plurality of Democrats who responded preferring a minimum wage between $10.00 and $10.50 per hour. According to Winston Churchill, if “you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions.” This does not apply to the $15 minimum wage. Evidence Empirically Points to Failure Another reason most economists oppose a $15 federal minimum wage is that the balance of empirical evidence suggests minimum wage hikes fail to achieve the policy goals they are intended to. In 2008, economists David Neumark and William L. Wascher surveyed two decades of research into the effects of minimum wage laws. They focused on five areas: the effects of minimum wages on employment, minimum wage effects on the distribution of wages and earnings, the effects of minimum wages on the distribution of incomes, the effects of minimum wages on skills, and the effects of minimum wages on prices and profits. Here is what they say about the policy’s impact on each: 1. Minimum wages reduce employment In other work (Neumark and Wascher 2007a), we review the entire recent body of literature on the employment effects of minimum wages, encompassing more than one hundred papers written since the early 1990s…In our lengthier review of employment effects, we conclude that, overall, about two-thirds of the hundred or so studies that we discuss yield relatively consistent (although by no means statistically significant) evidence of negative employment effects of minimum wages – while only eight give a relatively consistent indication of positive employment effects. In contrast, of the thirty-three studies we identify as providing the most reliable evidence, more than 80 percent point to negative employment effects. (p.38-39) 2. Minimum wage hikes reduce the earnings of low-paid workers …the evidence suggests that higher minimum wages tend, on average, to reduce the economic well-being of affected workers. Evidence regarding the effects on workers initially paid at or just above the minimum suggests that their labor income declines as a result of minimum wage increases, reflecting negative effects of minimum wages on employment and hours. (p.139) 3. Minimum wage hikes make some low paid workers better off at the expense of others In our view, the combined evidence is best summarized as indicating that an increase in the minimum wage largely results in a redistribution of income among low-income families, with some gaining and others losing as a result of diminished employment opportunities or reduced hours, and some likelihood that, on net, poor or low-income families are made worse off. (p.189) 4. Minimum wage hikes make young workers less skilled, lowering their future earnings With respect to schooling, the evidence is stronger, with most of the research for the United States pointing to negative effects…recent research that studies the question more indirectly finds that teens and youths exposed to higher minimum wages have lower wages and earnings when they are in their late twenties, consistent with reduced skill acquisition… (p. 223) 5. Minimum wage hikes make products and services more expensive ...the limited empirical evidence consistently indicates that increases in the minimum wage lead to increases in prices of goods and services produced with low-skilled labor…(p. 247-248)

The impact of IMF loans has been widely debated. Opponents of the IMF argue that the loans enable member countries to pursue reckless domestic economic policies knowing that, if needed, the IMF will bail them out. This safety net, critics charge, delays needed reforms and creates long-term dependency. Opponents also argue that the IMF rescues international bankers who have made bad loans, thereby encouraging them to approve ever riskier international investments.¶ IMF conditionalities have also been widely debated. Critics contend that IMF policy prescriptions provide uniform remedies that are not adequately tailored to each country’s unique circumstances. These standard, austere loan conditions reduce economic growth and deepen and prolong financial crises, creating severe hardships for the poorest people in borrowing countries and strengthening local opposition to the IMF.