Today we have another minimum-wage tidbit and another hypocritical big-city politician!  (I know, big surprise, right?)  Baltimore Mayor Supported $15 Minimum Wage Until She Learned What It Would Do to City’s Economy.  Excerpt:

During the 2016 campaign, Catherine Pugh was one of dozens of Democratic politicians calling for the implementation of a $15 per hour minimum wage.

Since being elected mayor of Baltimore in November, though, Pugh has changed her mind about the merits of forcing employers to pay such a high hourly rate. Last week, Pugh announced she would veto a $15 minimum wage bill passed by city council, citing concerns about how it would hurt the city’s economy, nonprofits and charities working in the city, and the city government’s bottom line.

After doing “some research,” Pugh said at a press conference on March 24, “it is not appropriate at this time that I will sign this bill, so I am vetoing this bill.”

Pugh said the bill would not be in the best interest of Baltimore’s 76,000 unemployed workers and would drive businesses out of the city to the surrounding counties.

Pugh obviously had what we used to refer to as a sudden rush of brains to the head.  (I may be being a little too generous.)   I’m pretty damn sure Mayor Pugh was considering the sudden increase in cost of the city’s union-scale employees; union contracts are frequently tied to a percentage over the prevailing minimum wage.

The really amazing thing here is finding a politician that realizes that the laws of economics (supply and demand, anyone?) can’t be overridden by good intentions and a sense of what’s “fair.”

But there’s a twist:  Pugh has been a business owner.  Unlike a lot of big-city pols, she has had to produce product and make payroll; she owned a public relations firm and a TV station.

Maybe this will be another nail in the coffin of minimum wage laws.  There is no real economic or moral justification for a law that freezes low-skilled workers out of the market – which is precisely what a wage floor does.