Steve Hanke Quotes

I do not support raising the minimum wage, and the reason is as follows. When the minimum wage is raised, workers are priced out of the market. That is the economic reality that seems, at least so far, to be missing from this discussion.

Statistical studies are all over the lot about the pluses and minuses of raising the minimum wage.

A minimum wage leads to higher levels of unemployment.

I do not support raising the minimum wage, and the reason is as follows: When the minimum wage is raised, workers are priced out of the market.

There's no question raising the minimum wage excessively causes a loss of jobs.

The real minimum wage is zero.

Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.

What is problematic about Obamacare is that it is killing millions of jobs in this country and has killed millions of jobs. It has forced millions of people into part time work. It has caused millions of people to lose their insurance, to lose their doctors, and to face skyrocketing insurance premiums. That is unacceptable.

On balance, I am a supporter of the minimum wage going up. We've got to be very careful what we wish for because some employers - and there could be a lot of them - will be scared away from hiring new people or creating incremental hours for part-time people as a result of that wage going up.

it seems to me absolutely scandalous to try to set wage levels which wipe out jobs. I mean these are people who are not on the dole. They want to work and if you price them out of the market, its gonna be a lot worse for them and for the economy.

People against the minimum wage say that many workers will lose their jobs. I haven’t ever met a minimum wage worker who didn’t say “Go for it!”

What is the cause of unemployment? Quite simply and unequivocally it is caused by paying ourselves more than the value of what we produce.

While the effect of increased global trade is positive for economies as a whole, specific sectors get battered, and large swathed of unskilled workers find themselves unemployed or under employed.

I don't know of a single economist who disagrees that when you raise the minimum wage, you kill jobs for the poor.

Demonetization crippled SMEs and has destroyed the unorganised sector, forcing workers to leave urban employment and go back to their villages looking for MNREGA work.

If you go from $7 to $15 in a very short period of time, potentially that could have a negative effect on some economies because that is a very big jump. And you're saying to businesses that employ a large number of minimum wage workers, your payroll is basically going to double. That could have a negative impact. It would have to be studied.

I think that we're so generous in some of our social problems that people are unwilling to get a job outside in the heat. Rather than get 15 dollars to go get roofing, they'd rather get 9 or 10 dollars in benefits.

If the opponents of an increase in the minimum wage were correct, then every time you fly to Seattle, you've got to bring a bagged lunch because there shouldn't be any restaurants because they should have all have gone out of business as a result of raising the minimum wage.

Increasing minimum wage doesn't build a stronger economy.

This is the debate we have every time we talk about the minimum wage, that if we raise it even 50 cents, that it means employers are just going to shut down. It's not true.

A minimum-wage law, a law that prevents employers and employees from entering into mutually beneficial economic exchanges, is as far from a free market or free enterprise as one can get. That's why it causes so much damage and destruction, especially to black teenagers and others whose labor, for one reason or another, is valued by employers at less than the government-established minimum wage.

In the past, we've always come up with new jobs for humans to do and so it's always benefitted us, technological progress, but now we're not really creating enough new jobs to replace the jobs that are being automated.

And a revolution of automation finds machines replacing men in the mines and mills of America, without replacing their incomes or their training or their needs to pay the family doctor, grocer and landlord.

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.

If you subsidize apples, you get more apples; if you subsidize unemployment, you get more of it.