The Results are in: Washington State's Higher Minimum wages helped increase and exceed National job growth numbers.

The minimum wage, a bad idea? If raising wages is such a bad idea, why do we keep raising CEO salaries? A higher minimum wages would attract the best and the brightest too, right?

Republicans don't want to talk about Washington State's higher minimum wage law, or the better than average job growth: 

Bloomberg News: When Washington residents voted in 1998 to raise the state’s minimum wage and link it to the cost of living, opponents warned the measure would be a job-killer. The prediction hasn’t been borne out.

In the 15 years that followed, the state’s minimum wage climbed to $9.32 -- the highest in the country. Meanwhile job growth continued at an average 0.8 percent annual pace, 0.3 percentage point above the national rate. Payrolls at Washington’s restaurants and bars, portrayed as particularly vulnerable to higher wage costs, expanded by 21 percent. Poverty has trailed the U.S. level for at least seven years.

Increasing the minimum hourly wage to $10.10 would also reduce food stamp expenditures by about 6 percent, or nearly $4.6 billion a year, according to a report this week from the Center for American Progress.