While Cuomo has been pushing for a $15 minimum wage in New York for the last six months, Brown faced a different political dynamic in California. The deal he struck was, he acknowledged, an attempt to head off a ballot initiative that was expected to pass in November. The proposal on the ballot would have phased in the increases sooner and without giving the governor flexibility to slow them during a recession. Union leaders who had been backing the ballot initiative said they would scrap it as soon as the legislature passed the compromise proposal. Fells said it was an acceptable trade-off for most workers. “The difference between a year or two is not a big difference when you haven’t been receiving any raises at all,” he said. “That’s the situation these workers are in.”

Brown’s demand for off ramps underscores the concern that exists even among supporters of a higher minimum wage that an increase to $15 an hour could have negative economic effects, especially in regions where prices and wages are lower. Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist and the former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote last October that while a “moderate” minimum wage should have little to no effect on employment, a $15 an hour floor “could well be counterproductive,” at least on the federal level.

Longtime opponents of higher minimum wages have far fewer doubts that the new laws would discourage hiring. “We’ve already run the experiment. We know the answers,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the president of the conservative American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. He said the impact would be particularly bad for teenage unemployment, which shot up to more than 20 percent after the last federal increase was enacted in the middle of the Great Recession. “They are the classic low-skilled, least-experienced kind of worker that gets hit by the minimum wage,” he said on Tuesday. “We’ll see the same thing in California and New York and whoever else decides to go that way.”

Holtz-Eakin said, however, that the consequences would be more subtle than mass layoffs. “The caricature of the employer throwing them out the front door—that’s not how it happens,” he said. “They can’t afford to expand, and the new locations can’t afford to start, and the dynamics of employment growth get interfered with.”

Supporters of minimum-wage increases argue that any negative effects on hiring will be more than outweighed by the boost in the purchasing power of workers with bigger paychecks, who will spend more money and spark a virtuous cycle for the economy. And they say $15 is not as large—or dangerous—a figure as it might look at first blush. Because the minimum wage was never indexed for inflation, either on the federal level or in most states, it lost value over the years, and the sharp increase merely catches it up to where it was—relative to the broader economy—in the 1960s. As Kink put it: “This is not necessarily a wild experiment.”

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