Minimum Trump

The primary is over, and the Republican is changing his mind.

The Donald Trump candidacy is going to be a daily adventure, on policy as much as rhetoric. No sooner did he vanquish his last Republican rival this week than he threw over his pledge to fund his own campaign and suggested that he may change his mind and endorse an increase in the federal minimum wage.

Making the media rounds after his Indiana victory, Mr. Trump was asked on CNN whether he’d be open to raising the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. “I am open to doing something with it, because I don’t like that,” Mr. Trump said. “Because I’m very different from most Republicans,” adding that “I mean, you have to have something that you can live on.”

Yes, but you also need a job to earn a wage, and a wage floor can price the young and least skilled out of the job market. A national minimum is also more destructive than state or local wage floors because it doesn’t account for variations in the job market and labor demand.

Mr. Trump understood the jobs point when he was competing with other Republicans who opposed raising the national minimum. “We have to leave it the way it is,” he said in November. “People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum” and “we cannot do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can’t do it.” He repeated the point more than once during the primaries.

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