September 15, 2016 10:20 AM UTC

The Return Of Economic Doomsday Dude Eric Fruits!

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Denver Post’s Aldo Svaldi reported this week on competing studies in favor and opposed to Amendment 70, the proposal to increase Colorado’s minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020:

Lifting Colorado’s minimum wage from $8.31 an hour to $12 an hour would pump $400 million into the state economy and raise living standards for one in five households — all with minimal impacts on inflation or total employment, according to a study released Tuesday from the University of Denver…

About 400,000 Colorado households will see higher incomes, half of those families with children, if Amendment 70, the higher-minimum-wage measure up for a vote in November, passes, according to the study.

All of which sounds great, but as you can imagine, opponents have their own study forecasting massive job losses for Colorado–and it’s from a name our longtime readers will recognize:

Opponents of Amendment 70 point to a study from Portland State University economist Eric Fruits that estimates Colorado could end up with 90,000 fewer jobs if the minimum wage rises to $12 an hour.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure, Eric Fruits is a right-wing “free market” economist based in Oregon, whose dire predictions of massive reduction in Colorado employment back in 2011 helped the ill-fated Proposition 103 education tax increase proposal go down in flames. Fruits’ already dubious forecast was wildly exaggerated by local opponents of Proposition 103, eventually claiming “over 100,000 jobs would be lost” if that modest tax hike had passed.

This time, however, minimum wage increase proponents aren’t taking Fruits’ doomsaying lying down:

Chris Stiffler, an economist with the Colorado Fiscal Institute, a pro-70 group, back tested Fruit’s model with the bump up in the Colorado minimum wage to $6.85 from $5.15 to that occurred on Jan. 1, 2007.

Colorado gained 71,000 jobs in the two years that followed and didn’t suffer the losses that Fruit’s model projected would happen, given a 33 percent jump in the state minimum wage. [Pols emphasis]

That’s right, folks–applied to real-world experience, Fruits’ gloom and doom “model” doesn’t hold up at all! The hyperbolic hand-wringing over Fruits’ predictions of economic disaster got so bad in 2011 that after awhile, we could only lampoon it–but as the saying goes, “a lie travels the world before the truth can get its pants on.”

The rule today with Eric Fruits, just like then, is don’t believe the hype.