Originally published in The Seattle Times May 1, 2014

ANXIOUS business owners are often told by minimum-wage supporters to quit worrying, since a higher minimum wage supposedly means more customers with more money to spend.

It is an appealingly simple argument. Many have repeated it as Seattle considers raising the minimum wage. On Thursday, Mayor Ed Murray offered a plan to raise the minimum wage from the state’s $9.32 to $15 per hour over a three- to seven-year period depending on the size of the business.

Unfortunately, as minimum-wage expert David Neumark, of the University of California-Irvine points out in a study, “There is simply no evidence” that boosting the minimum wage would stimulate the economy through consumer spending.

SEIU-affiliated activist group Good Jobs Seattle recently expressed frustration on its blog that businesses are just “not seeing the tens of thousands of potential customers out there who aren’t yet spending money in their business because they can’t afford it on poverty wages.”

Local minimum-wage advocates simply take the number of workers earning less than a proposed minimum wage, multiply it by the wage increase per worker, and conclude that increasing the wage floor creates millions of dollars in new consumer spending in the economy.

Labor-backed group Puget Sound Sage recently used this method in a policy brief to estimate that a $15 minimum wage in Seattle would generate millions in new economic activity.

Read the rest of this op-ed in The Seattle Times here.