Yesterday U.S. Senators Patty Murray and Bernie Sanders published an editorial in The Seattle Times announcing they have joined forces to introduce legislation that would increase the federal minimum wage by 107%.

Senators Murray and Sanders believe it is time for every worker in the country to earn a $15 minimum wage.  They say it is time to take workers from a “starvation wage” to a “living wage.”  Next comes a series of tired claims that are so predictable, yet patently flawed, that it will take several blog posts to address them all. 

The bottom line is the claim that workers, employers and the economy will thrive with a $15 federal minimum wage is absurd.  Even economists who support increasing the minimum wage say $15 is too high.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded in a 2014 report that while increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 would help some low-wage workers, it would leave another 500,000 unemployed.  As The Hill reported, a former CBO director (who requested anonymity) warned that an increase to $15 per hour would eliminate “many more jobs … because it would cut much further into the distribution of wages.”  The former CBO director explained, “The effect is not linear, it rises much faster.”

A 2015 study conducted by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who headed the CBO from 2003 to 2005, the report found increasing the minimum wage to $15 would transfer an additional $105 billion to low-wage workers, but less than 7% of the money would benefit those living in poverty. Meanwhile, 6.6 million jobs would be eliminated.

And the Alice Rivlin, the CBO’s founding director, has said an increase to $15 is a bad idea: “I think $15 is too big a jump.” 

A University of New Hampshire survey in 2015 found that 72% of economists oppose a $15 federal minimum wage. Dissenters include former members of the Obama and Clinton administrations.  

Katharine Abraham, President Bill Clinton’s commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and economic adviser to President Obama, supports increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 but says $15 it too high.

“We have no experience with an increase in the national minimum of that size and I am concerned about what a $15 minimum nationwide would do to employment.” 

Georgetown University professor Harry Holzer was President Clinton's top economist at the Labor Department, and like Abraham he supports a $10.10 minimum wage at the federal level, but calls a hike to $15 "extremely risky."  Alan B. Krueger, the former chairman of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, also thinks an increase to $15 is too high, saying a $15 minimum could be "counterproductive."

Professor Arindrajit Dube, a left-leaning economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, actively supports a “modestly higher wage” than the current federal wage of $7.25.   He says a radical increase to $15 an hour could hurt employment and increase prices:

“Would I be concerned about possible job losses if there were a $15 minimum wage...yes, I’d be concerned.”

Other notable economists share Dube’s concern.  Professor David Neumark, an economics professor at University of California, Irvine, has spent years researching the impact of minimum wage increases, especially on employment.  Neumark estimates a $15 minimum wage would reduce employment in industries like fast food by 5% to 6%:

“Anyone who thinks sensibly about this should be concerned that $15 would have a big effect on employment.”

Even the liberal Employment Policy Institute (EPI), which gets about a quarter of its funding from labor unions and supports increasing the federal minimum wage to 12 by 2020, worries $15 it too high:

"We just don't know what would happen if we push the minimum wage higher than those levels."

EPI may not know what would happen if the minimum wage was increased an unprecedented 107%, but I don't think it's a stretch to predict it wouldn't be the "win-win-win" for workers (especially those with little or no skills), employers or the economy that Senators Muray and Sanders claim.