Hard News by Russell Brown

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Hard News: The Political Lie

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  • Ross Mason,

    Spike Milligan:

    "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and that is just long enough to become POTUS."

    Why does that feel so.....believable......when you consider practically any political system?.

    Upper Hutt • Since Jun 2007 • 1590 posts Report Reply

  • Sacha,

    Tapu Misa on the continued disinformation about minimum wage impacts on employment, especially after the world's financial collapse.

    It would be nice to think that economists had become more humble about the limitations of their field.

    Yet economic myths (that tax cuts lead to growth, or magically "pay for themselves") continue to be trotted out as scientific truth, rather than articles of faith.

    So what's the truth about minimum wage increases and the effect on employment? It's a lot more complicated than Key suggests.

    The international evidence is mixed, as the Department of Labour noted in its advice to the Government.

    It's true that most economists have believed that higher minimum wages invariably reduce employment among low-paid workers. A number of US studies from the 1970s had suggested a significant negative link between the minimum wage and youth employment.

    But more recent studies have undercut the conventional view, and questioned the evidence on which it was built.

    One large study which analysed 64 US minimum wage studies found not only that there was bias in the selection of published studies towards those which showed negative effects on employment, but that once the bias was removed there were actually positive effects.

    Probably the strongest and most influential challenge to the traditional worldview came from the work of David Card and Allan Krueger, whose wide-ranging analysis of minimum wage increases in the US in the late 1980s and early 1990s turned conventional economic wisdom on its head and suggested, as one economist wrote, "that economists know less about what the invisible hand is up to than they let on".

    In New Zealand, a study in 2007 by Dean Hyslop and Steve Stillman which looked at the effect of increases of between 41 per cent and 69 per cent in the youth minimum wage found "no major robust evidence of adverse effects on youth employment or hours worked", in fact, there was an increase in hours worked for those aged 16 and 17.

    Ak • Since May 2008 • 19745 posts Report Reply

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