40% increase in private sector jobs over the last 4 years were minimum wage.

Why middle class conservatives continue to sit by watching their jobs disappear and their incomes decline is a mystery to me. 

I want you to take note of every Republicans who sticks to the old jobs and wages talking points that unfortunately for them, were made obsolete after the Great Recession. Scott Walker and Paul Ryan especially. A new report confirms what Democrats have been saying for the last 3 years; we're a service economy now, along with a new business model:

NY Times: The deep recession wiped out primarily high-wage and middle-wage jobs. Yet the strongest employment growth during the sluggish recovery has been in low-wage work, at places like strip malls and fast-food restaurants … the poor economy has replaced good jobs with bad ones. That is the conclusion of a new report from the National Employment Law Project, a research and advocacy group, analyzing employment trends four years into the recovery.

“Fast food is driving the bulk of the job growth at the low end — the job gains there are absolutely phenomenal,” said Michael Evangelist, the report’s author. “If this is the reality — if these jobs are here to stay and are going to be making up a considerable part of the economy — the question is, how do we make them better?”

The report shows that total employment has finally surpassed its pre-recession level. “The good news is we’re back to zero,” Mr. Evangelist said.

Higher-wage industries shed 3.6 million positions during the recession and have added only 2.6 million positions. But lower-wage industries lost two million jobs, then added 3.8 million.

With 10.5 million Americans still looking for work employers feel no pressure to raise wages for those who are working. As a result, the average household’s take-home pay has declined through the recession and the recovery to $51,017 in 2012 from $55,627 in 2007, after adjusting for inflation.

With joblessness high and job gains concentrated in low-wage industries, hundreds of thousands of Americans have accepted positions that pay less than they used to make, in some cases, sliding out of the middle class and into the ranks of the working poor.

There were about a million fewer jobs in middle-wage industries … Economists worry that even a stronger recovery might not bring back jobs in traditionally middle-class occupations eroded by mechanization and offshoring. 

President Obama said raising (the minimum wage) to $10.10 would “lift wages for nearly 28 million Americans across the country. The average minimum-wage worker is 35 years old. But many Republicans oppose raising the wage floor while the economy remains weak. 

The study found especially strong growth in restaurants and food services, administrative and waste services and retail trades. Those industries, which often pay wages at the federal minimum, accounted for about 40 percent of the increase in private sector employment over the past four years. Strong jobs growth in some high-paying industries, accounted for about 9 percent of the private-sector job gains in the recovery.