TIMES SURE HAVE CHANGED. Greg Mankiw points out that it wasn’t all that long ago that the New York Times was editorialising against the minimum wage.

My position on the minimum wage is like that of many economists: I’m agin it. It does a lousy job of targeting poverty, because most of the people who get it aren’t poor, and most of the people who are poor don’t get it. To the extent that it does help the poor, it often does so by transferring money from other poor people–those who lose jobs due to the higher minimum wage, and those who shop at places that pay the minimum wage. Instead, I favour the Earned Income Tax Credit.

The EITC is progressive, benefits only those who work, targets the poor exclusively, and can be much more easily fine tuned to extend the right amount of help to the working poor and near-poor.

Indeed, proponents of a higher minimum wage are also in favour of raising the EITC. They argue that we need both for two reasons, both of them unconvincing: first, because “a programme for the poor is a poor programme” (in other words, we need a huge middle class subsidy to give the programme a constituency), and second, because we should be targeting income in multiple ways.

The first is silly, because the EITC has proved politically more popular than the minimum wage; it has been raised in every major tax package in recent history. The second is foolish because when you talk about putting together a package of support programmes, you are generally trying to offset the strengths and weaknesses of the various individual components. But there is no weakness of the EITC that the minimum wage addresses; the EITC is superior on pretty much every count. Why on earth would you tack an economic inefficient, poorly targeted programme which may cause all sorts of adverse effects on poor workers, onto a structure that already works beautifully on its own?

That assumes, of course, that one wants to tax prosperous citizens to help those who are struggling, which is a different discussion. But if we’re going to do poverty programmes, lets do them right.