Industry Behind Anti-Wage-Hike Letter
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/us/industry-tied-to-letter-against-new-wage.html
WASHINGTON — The National Restaurant Association did not disclose upfront its role in helping draft and circulate a statement signed by more than 500 prominent economists, including four winners of the Nobel Prize, urging the federal government to reject the proposal by the Obama administration to increase the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, interviews with signers of the letter showed.
The statement was distributed to prominent economists nationwide under the name of Vernon L. Smith, a Nobel Prize-winning professor of economics and law at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., concluding that the minimum wage “is a poorly targeted antipoverty measure.”
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Mr. Smith and several of the other economists who signed the statement said in interviews Friday that they had agreed to support it based on the merits of the argument, and that who had initiated it was unimportant.
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The National Restaurant Association took several steps that in effect distanced it from the role it played in creating the statement. They included asking a former Treasury Department official, James E. Carter, to approach Mr. Smith at Chapman University, and then paying him to use a database of conservative economists that Mr. Carter maintains to ask them to sign the statement distributed in Mr. Smith’s name, participants involved in the effort said.
Mr. Smith said he had been asked for input but had not written the statement , which was sent out with an opening that said, “Message from Vernon L. Smith.”
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The restaurant industry statement is a reply, of sorts, to a similar statement signed by more than 600 economists endorsing the increase of the minimum wage. That statement was distributed by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington research organization that receives about 30 percent of its funding from labor unions.
But the institute was clear about its role in collecting signatures and promoting the statement once it was released in January. The statement became a target of lobbying against a wage increase; an advertisement in The New York Times by a nonprofit group run by a firm supported by the restaurant industry, Berman & Co., noted that some of the signers were, at least at some point, self-avowed Marxists.