About a decade or so ago, the city of Seattle undertook to raise its minimum wage, over time, to $15/hour. (Massive credit to my friend Nick Hanauer f

Seattle Redux: Misunderstanding Seasonal Adjustments

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2024-06-09 16:30:04

About a decade or so ago, the city of Seattle undertook to raise its minimum wage, over time, to $15/hour. (Massive credit to my friend Nick Hanauer for his efforts to make that happen.) What followed in the immediate aftermath of both the announcement and implementation was nothing less than a apocalyptic, collective head explosion on the right about the devastating effects the increase would have, particularly in the food services sector:

According to the Washington Policy Center, it’s already having unintended consequences: namely, forcing restaurants to close. — NY Post

I documented the idiocy and errors throughout, including the fact that critics focused, quite inappropriately, on the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), an area vastly larger and more populated than the city of Seattle proper (King County). But Mark Perry, who led the charge, was never one to let the truth get in the way of a good narrative.

Using the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages – a very accurate survey that comes with a long lag – we can drill down to King County and see, quite clearly, that the restaurant sector continued hiring apace throughout the incremental increases in the minimum wage. All of the naysayers were, in a word, wrong.