The chartmakers at “Political Calculations” have released a new graph showing “A Decade of Disappearing Teen Jobs” Political Calculations blame minimum wage laws for keeping teens from gainful employment. “As we see in the chart,” write the authors, “the practical effect of all the minimum wage hikes that occurred from 2007 through 2009 was to remove the jobs available for this portion of the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized labor force.”
That is the result of a structural change in the U.S. economy, where changes in the laws mandating the amount of the minimum wage at the federal, state and local levels have made it too costly for employers with little ability to increase their revenues to continue to hire the members of the least educated, least skilled and least experienced portion of the U.S. workforce: Americans between the ages of 16 and 19. Their ability to generate revenue for the businesses who might employ them is too little to justify the cost of employing them at the governments’ mandated minimum wages.
