For sixty years the New York Times was a staunch opponent of increases in the minimum wage, correctly arguing that such actions price many poor, unskilled workers out of the labor market. Bruce Bartlett has been following the Times' editorial stance on the issue since the 1970s, and was taken aback five years ago to see the paper do a sudden, complete reversal on the issue. Without explanation, since 1999 they have been promoting higher minimum wages just as aggressively as they had been opposing it previously.
Gone are all the old arguments that higher minimum wages cost jobs, are mainly promoted by unions to stifle competition, that most of the benefits go to the children of the well-to-do rather than the poor and that legislating higher wage costs would be inflationary. Now the Times accepts the justification for a higher minimum wage as given and doesn't even try to marshal any facts or analyses in favor of its new position. It simply says the minimum wage should be raised, as if its opinion on the matter is all that anyone needs to know.
We may never know what happened in the summer of 1999 to cause this about-face, but one thing for sure is that the Times can no longer be accused of harboring opinions that are out of step with the left's orthodoxy.
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