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Friday, May 16, 2014

Republicans Fiercely defend Minimum Wage Job Killing Lie, and still want your vote.

While Republican politicians mindlessly accept the false narrative that a higher minimum wage is a job killer, the facts are telling Americans something completely different. Maybe that's why they support a hike. The highest minimum wage cities and states are seeing the best growth, better than states with the federal rate of $7.25. And who knows, maybe Americans will move to areas that pay well, forcing states to compete for workers too:
If you need more evidence that a higher minimum wage won't kill the economy, consider this: The city with one of the highest minimum wages in the country has had faster job growth than any other big city over the past 10 years. San Francisco's small businesses are growing faster than those of any other big city or the nation as a whole, according to new data from payroll-processor Paychex and research firm IHS. And this is happening despite the fact that, as of January 1, San Francisco's minimum wage was $10.74 an hour, higher than any state minimum wage or the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
And the CBO report that Republicans now adamantly support, unlike their estimates on the Affordable Care Act, bucked the consensus of economist who say there would be no real harm in the increase:  
Whitehouse.gov: CBO’s estimates of the impact of raising the minimum wage on employment does not reflect the current consensus view of economists. The bulk of academic studies, have concluded that the effects on employment of minimum wage

increases in the range now under consideration are likely to be small to nonexistent. Specifically. Seven Nobel Prize Winners, eight former Presidents of the American Economic Association and over 600 other economists recently summarized the literature on the employment effects of the minimum wage in this way: “...the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market.” A recent literature review of the extensive published work on the minimum wage concluded: “...we have reason to believe that if there is some adverse employment effect ... it must be of a small and policy-irrelevant magnitude.”
The doom-and-gloom mob of Republicans skipped the benefits of higher wages:
AmericanProgress: CBO estimates that 16.5 million workers would see their wages increase and that the total annual increase in wages for those workers would be $31 billion. This leaves low-income workers $24 billion better off even after we account for slower job growth. Add in the impact of slightly higher consumer prices, and low-income families are still $19 billion better off. And as CBO points out, it is not just these families that benefit. On average, households with incomes of less than about $125,000 would benefit as well, and households with incomes of $30,000 to $65,000 would get an average of about $200 more per year. Families with incomes of less than about $30,000 would get an average of more than $300 in additional income per year. Most striking is the fact that this one piece of legislation would lift about 900,000 Americans out of poverty ... CBO makes a strong case for congressional action to raise the minimum wage.

1 comment:

  1. Loony liberal fiction must be fun in bizarro world.

    http://www.yourwestvalley.com/opinion/article_3a212b6c-db88-11e3-9e78-0019bb2963f4.html

    ReplyDelete