1/ Kudos to @TheOnion for this hilariously deadpan parody of a @WSJopinion editorial on the minimum wage!
2/ Wait. What? No. You mean this isn't The Onion? Well then it must be a brilliant self-parody, right? I mean, @WSJopinion even includes the obligatory eye-rolling appeal to "Econ 101" in the lede! 
3/ Also comically-classic @WSJopinion is how it consistently misrepresents the facts. In fact, the original UW study did not find hours or wages fell. Rather, it speculated that hours & wages rose slower than they did in the alternative history of a fictional "Synthetic Seattle."
4/ Also, also... what?! A) Why on earth would they use the first number, and then present the more current revision parenthetically; and B) that's a huge fucking revision! Why was there no PR campaign promoting the revision like there was for the higher preliminary number? Weird.
5/ Actually, the study splits effects into THREE categories, not two. But this is only editorial about numbers, so who's counting, amirite, @WSJopinion?
6/ @WSJopinion dismisses "more earnings, less work" as if that's a bad thing, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the class biases of @WSJopinion.
7/ Actually, I think the word the editors are reaching for is"REFUTED." And by coming to the opposite conclusion, yes, the 2018 study is a refutation of the 2017 study.
8/ Remember that time @WSJopinion argued that through "more earnings, less work," a $15 min wage gives workers "more hours free" to take care of their kids, spend time with friends, or maybe commute to a 2nd job? That's what's known in the propaganda arena as an "own goal."
9/ Okay, again, A) the 2017 report did not show that "Seattle's low-wage payroll, in the aggregate, shrank"—it showed that the number of low-wage jobs didn't grow as fast as they did in entirely fictional, non-existent, "Synthetic Seattle."
10/ And B) um, I'd hate to suggest doing math in an editorial focused on numerical data, but perhaps one of the things limiting the number of low-wage jobs in Seattle is that many of these jobs no longer pay low wages?
11/ With record low unemployment & 1000s of unfilled jobs at all wage levels, what @WSJopinion is describing is a shortage of WORKERS, not jobs. So, wouldn't the textbook solution actually be to further RAISE wages—until the supply of labor meets demand? I mean... it's Econ 101!
12/ Again, Seattle enjoys record low unemployment, and the study explicitly finds no loss in jobs. That said, consulting my Econ 101 textbook, orthodox economic theory does offer a scenario in which a higher min wage could result in no job loss: a labor market monopsony. #OwnGoal
13/ And conservatives never seem to learn that economics isn't physics. There are no natural laws of economics. Force always equals mass times acceleration. Always. But as we've seen in Seattle, raising the cost of labor does not always decrease demand (no matter what WSJ says).
14/ There's an old joke about an economist, who when confronted with empirical evidence scoffs: "That's all very well and good that it works in practice. But does it work in theory?"
On min wage, to call @WSJopinion "a joke" would be imprecise. It's this particularly joke.
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On min wage, to call @WSJopinion "a joke" would be imprecise. It's this particularly joke.
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