A grey lady correction on minimum wage

The New York Times has agreed to print a correction of this article about the minimum wage issue, which includes inaccurate information implicitly attributed to Empire Center senior fellow Russell Sykes.

Here’s the final paragraph from the original article, with the offending passage in boldface:

Russell Sykes, a senior fellow at the Empire Center for New York State Policy, said raising the minimum wage would not be as helpful to poor families as the earned income tax credit. For a single mother who earns the minimum wage and has two children, for instance, the state and federal credits would increase her annual income to more than $21,000 a year, or the equivalent of about $10.50 an hour, Mr. Sykes said. But that family would stand to become ineligible for the credits under a minimum wage increase.

The last statement was not only never made by Rus – it is also inaccurate regardless of its attribution. In fact, the hypothetical family in question would only lose about $230 of its EITC benefit, and would not become ineligible as the article states.

Rus’ has written a thorough overview of why the EITC is a more practical and targeted solution to low wages and poverty than a minimum wage increase. The Empire Center also recently issued “Making Work Pay in New York,” his Policy Briefing paper on the EITC.