“TANSTAAFL” stands for “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.” “TANSTAAFMWH” means “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Minimum Wage Hike.
 
“There’s no such thing as a free minimum wage hike” by Sam Bowman was published on January 10, 2014 on the blog of the Adam Smith Institute. Bowman showed that raising the minimum wage is not “free” and comes at a cost, such as higher unemployment. “TANSTAAFMWH: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Minimum Wage Hike” was cited on Twitter the same day, iting this article (although the article does not contain the initialism).
 
Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute “AEIdeas” blog wrote on July 6, 2015, “Who-d a-thunk it? SF minimum wage increased 14% and local Chipotles just raised prices by 10-14%?” Perry stated:
 
“Economic Lesson: TANSTAAFMWH, — ‘there ain’t no such thing as a free minimum wage hike.’”
 
   
Adam Smith Institute blog
There’s no such thing as a free minimum wage hike
Written by Sam Bowman | Friday, January 10th, 2014
(...)
I understand that many Conservatives are coming to see a minimum wage hike as a political ‘free lunch’ – a popular and surprising way of showing an interest in the welfare of the poor that does not affect the government’s balance sheet. I hope this is not true. Contrary to Kirby’s claims, there are good empirical and theoretical reasons to think that raising the floor on the price of labour will cause more unemployment. And unemployment destroys lives. There are lots of things we can and should do to help the poor right now. Raising the minimum wage isn’t one of them.
 
Twitter
Ben Southwood
‏@bswud
TANSTAAFMWH: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Minimum Wage Hike http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/economics/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-free-minimum-wage-hike …
9:01 AM - 10 Jan 2014
   
American Enterprise Institute
Mark J. Perry @Mark_J_Perry
July 6, 2015 2:44 pm | AEIdeas
Who-d a-thunk it? SF minimum wage increased 14% and local Chipotles just raised prices by 10-14%?
(...)
Economic Lesson: TANSTAAFMWH, — “there ain’t no such thing as a free minimum wage hike.” Or to paraphrase David French, vice-president of the National Retail Federation, “There simply isn’t any magic pot of money that lets employers pay higher wages just because the government says so, without making adjustments elsewhere like cutting workers’ hours, reducing their non-cash fringe benefits, and/or passing the higher wages along to consumers in the form of higher prices.” After all, the minimum wage is not really a political problem, it’s a math problem. And the 10-14% price increases at Chipotles in San Francisco are just the new math problem now facing the restaurant chain’s customers, who’ll now be paying about $1 extra for each burrito bowl….
 
Washington (DC) Examiner
Study: Minimum wage hike boosted price of Chipotle burritos
By EMILIE PADGETT • 7/7/15 3:22 PM
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Mark Perry, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and economics professor at University of Michigan’s Flint campus, named the parallel price increase after a popular adage, calling the reciprocity a “TANSTAAFMWH — there ain’t no such thing as a free minimum wage hike.”
 
“And the 10-14 percent price increases at Chipotles in San Francisco are just the new math problem now facing the restaurant chain’s customers, who’ll now be paying about $1 extra for each burrito bowl,” he said.
 
Perry made clear that complications over minimum wage “is not really a political problem, it’s a math problem.”