Macomb County's Board of Commissioners is debating the necessity of a 'living wage' policy. Instead of listening to the phony pleas of poverty from the private sector perhaps our county commissioners should pay attention to the Detroit expert on the subject, according to Wayne State University Labor Studies specialist, David Reynolds. Reynolds studied living wages and found that in city after city, the corporate critics were wrong. "We found that there was little impact on the contracting process - the number of bids they were getting or the price companies were charging," said Reynolds. "They did not see any shift in economic development. There was no evidence of job losses. There was no change in their ability to attract business investments." He first separated fact from fiction in a 1999 study of the Detroit living wage ordinance. He found that contractors' costs only rose about 1 percent, while most of the affected workers received raises of $1,300 to $4,400 a year."