The Minimum Wage Tax Increase

 By far the most common criticism of minimum wages is that they cost jobs. This is incomplete—the data often show smaller job losses than one would expect after minimum wages go up. This is because workers earn more than wages—they also get non-wage pay such as insurance, free food and parking, and more. When regulations cause wage pay to go up, employers cut non-wage pay to pay for it. Job cuts happen, but they tend to be a last resort. I recently wrote a paper on these underappreciated tradeoffs.

The most underappreciated minimum wage tradeoff is a tax increase on the poor, which for some people would exceed $2,000. When untaxed non-wage pay is converted to taxable wages, workers pay higher taxes, without necessarily making more money. If a $15 minimum wage passes, it could cost some workers more than $2,000 in taxes, in addition to all the other non-wage pay cuts that come with a minimum wage increase.

I try to shine some light on this in an op-ed for Inside Sources:

To afford higher wages, employers cut back on other benefits, like health insurance, workplace leave flexibility, free meals, free parking or tuition reimbursement. That’s a real loss to workers, considering that non-wage pay is mostly tax-free.

By incentivizing employers to convert nonwage benefits to wages,  minimum wage advocates are, probably unknowingly, proposing a massive tax increase on the poor.

For some workers, this would mean a tax increase of up to $2,370 per year at a $15 per hour minimum wage. Depending on which state a worker lives in and other factors, shifting untaxed non-wage pay over to taxable wages could also expose some minimum wage earners to income tax liability, sales taxes and other taxes.

Read the whole thing here. My paper “Minimum Wages Have Tradeoffs” is here.