Here's another data point destroying the already long since destroyed Republican argument that raising the minimum wage will cause job loss. Washington state has a minimum wage nearly $2 higher than neighboring Idaho.
And yet, researchers:
[...] looked at 16 years worth of restaurant employment data for 316 pairs of border counties.
“And when you add up all those comparisons and look at the average of all those differences in employment, the difference is zero,” said Lester.
Or, to put it another way: When the minimum wage increases, said Lester,“On aggregate, there's no job losses.”
As if designed for dramatic effect, in one pair of border towns, one side of the street is in Idaho and the other side is in Washington. Guess which side the McDonald's is on? Yup, the classic low-wage employer's franchise is on the Washington side, and stayed there even when an old building was torn down and replaced with a new, expanded one. The franchise owner told an NPR reporter that "with growing our business, I need more employees. So we've grown substantially I'd say in the last year and a half." Despite a state minimum wage of $9.19, a level that opponents of raising the minimum wage are always telling us will harm low-wage workers by killing jobs and making them unemployed.
The basic point isn't anything new: We saw similar results in New England. And New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And San Francisco and the East Bay. And, well, gosh, a whole bunch of other places.
Facts by themselves are never going to make Republicans stop repeating falsehoods. But if enough people know the facts, Republicans start to have an incentive to acknowledge them.