L.A. raises minimum wage to $15/hr

#democraticprocesses

 

I'm highly dubious of the wisdom of, say, a national $15/hr minimum wage, but....OH THE HUMANITY!


I feel like the title of the graph is much more stark than the graph itself. The retail peak was July '15, after the minimum wage jumped from $8 to $9 in Jan 15, FWIW.
And that trend line the first few months of '16 looks decent.
To expand out the lens - unemployment in Mass.

Unemployment rate:


So, in sum, what happens in Mass is worth watching. But there's nothing there that seems to warrant the WARNING: in the title or that seems particularly scary.

 

It's a dangerous (well, not really) game to draw inferences based on this combination of graphs. The top one is raw totals (seasonally adjusted) of those employed, while the bottom are rates (seasonally adjusted) for a particular subset of those who might be employed. Perhaps these numbers are quasi-complements, but there's a damn good chance they're not.

 

Why's everybody looking at me?