The New York Times reports: “Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry on Friday proposed raising the federal minimum wage to $7 an hour by 2007, which he contended would benefit working women more than any other group.”
It is moments like this that make me wonder why economists even bother. It would be as if mathematicians impotently watched in horror, year after year, decade after decade, as prominent community leaders talked about 2 + 2 being equal to 5. (And who is this Eileen Appelbaum, economist at Rutgers, who endorses the proposal?! In a sane world, she would be fired for incompetence.)
