Dave has written well here …
ONLY SEATTLEITES GET TO DECIDE WHETHER SEATTLE’S $15 MINIMUM WAGE SUCCEEDS OR FAILS
I recently took some time to preemptively fend off future attacks on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage ordinance, pointing out that our local economy is currently so outlandishly strong that there’s almost nowhere for unemployment to go but up. Seattle’s current 3.15% unemployment rate has never proven to be sustainable in the past, and is unlikely to prove sustainable into the future. So when we do eventually see a bump in unemployment—and we will (be it in absolute terms or just relative to the larger state economy)—it will on its own be evidence of absolutely nothing. As I explained last week:
The real measure of Seattle’s minimum wage experiment is not whether our jobs numbers tick up or down relative to some cherry-picked starting point or some arbitrary low-wage city comparison. The real measure of success is whether Seattle can sustain a reasonably healthy and robust economy while providing all our workers a livable wage.
