GLENN: I love this from FiveThirtyEight: Seattle's minimum wage hike may have gone too far. No. No. It can't be.
STU: No. Come on.
GLENN: Stop it.
STU: And, by the way, the research doesn't even cover the full increase. It only covers $13, not even to $15 an hour. So if they went too far for 13, can you imagine what this is going to look like when the next elevation comes?
GLENN: Listen to this: As cities across the country push for minimum wages at untested heights in recent years, some economists began to ask, how high is too high? Seattle, with the highest in-country minimum wage may have hit that limit.
January 2016, Seattle minimum wage jumped from $11 an hour to $13, for large employers, the second big increase in less than a year. New research released Monday by a team of economists at the University of Washington.
The -- there's not a socialist that is an unemployed teacher, as long as the University of Washington is still open. There's a socialist without a job! Quick, get him to the university.
They suggest the wage hike may have come at a significant cost. Now, this is -- I want you to know, this is unexpected.
The increase led to steep declines in unemployment for low-wage workers, a drop of hours for those who kept their jobs.
Crucially, the negative impact of lost jobs and hours more than offset the benefits of the higher wages. On average, low-wage workers earned $125 a month less because of the higher wage. A small, but significant decline. Oh, I don't know. $125, if I'm working minimum wage, is not a small and insignificant decline.
STU: No, it says a significant -- the other thing I would mention too is, Glenn, you said "a decline in unemployment," unintentionally. It is "a decline in employment." It is a decline in employment. It's important to note.
GLENN: I'm sorry. Yes. Yes. The goal of this policy was to deliver higher incomes to people who were struggling to make ends meet in the city.
Now, could we please go back in the audio vault and find when we were having this debate on the air? And I would like a highlight reel of us saying this is exactly what is going to happen. Exactly. We mentioned all of this. Now they need a university to say, this is what's happening. This is kind of unexpected. We didn't really see this one coming. We thought this was -- you know, we didn't learn this in school. Of course, we haven't been teaching, you know, the free market by any stretch of the imagination. So we don't really know what -- what was going to happen. But this doesn't look good. They note in this article, this is not peer reviewed yet. They're going to get some peers to review and say, oh, no. University of Washington, they didn't understand the fluffamagug, which is the theory that changes everything.