EDITORIAL: Shelve minimum wage initiative permanently

If you're a young worker looking to gain experience, or the parent of a teenager whom you hope will get off the couch in this or subsequent summers, you recently got the best possible news: there might actually be jobs available.

As the Review-Journal's Sandra Chereb reported, an initiative to gradually raise Nevada's minimum wage to $13 per hour was withdrawn by backers who worried the issue would get lost on a crowded 2016 ballot, amid the noise of a raucous presidential election. Never mind that. This is an initiative that shouldn't make it on an all-but-empty ballot, even if the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada — which is backing the issue — could get the 55,000 signatures it needed by June 21 in order to qualify the proposed constitutional amendment for November's general election ballot.

Nevada's youth unemployment numbers can't be stressed enough in this argument. In the most recent 12-month rolling average, unemployment for workers age 16-24 was 13.1 percent, according to statistics from the Nevada Department of Employment. And the state's teen unemployment, according to the Employment Policies Institute's MinimumWage.com tracker, is more than 20 percent.

Raising the minimum wage, even gradually, will only to serve to increase those already awful numbers. Minimum wage hikes in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles have proven that point. Jed Graham of Investor's Business Daily recently reported that hiring by restaurants, hotels and hospitality sector venues -- all key to youth employment and specifically to the Las Vegas jobs market -- slowed markedly in 2015 in metro areas that saw big minimum wage hikes.

In this presidential election year, many voters are throwing in with Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, who are both advocating hefty hikes to the minimum wage. But the higher the minimum wage goes, the harder it is for young and unskilled workers to break into the workforce. PLAN was right to withdraw its initiative. It would be better served to shelve it permanently.