Resolved: A $15 Minimum Wage Is Fine

The issue of minimum wage is not as simple as you, a moron, saying “I would like to be paid more money.” It is about complex economics. Now we have a big old CBO report on the $15 minimum wage proposal. Is it good? Yeah, it’s good.

Would you like to read the full CBO report on the economic implications of the proposal to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour? Haha, no, as mentioned above you are a simpleton who turns to the experts at SplinterNews.com to digest these tricky issues for you. So here are the main points in bullet point format:

Job losses are estimated to fall in a range of 0-3.7 million, with a median estimate of 1.3 million.
17 million workers making less than $15 an hour currently would get a raise, as well as an additional 10 million workers whose wages are just over $15 now, for a total of 27 million workers getting a raise.
The costs of the proposal would mostly hit higher earning households, and the benefits would most accrue to lower-earning households: “CBO estimates that families whose income would be below the poverty threshold under current law would receive an additional $8 billion in real family income in 2025 under this option. That would amount to a 5.3 percent increase in income, on average, for such families. That extra income would move, on net, roughly 1.3 million people out of poverty. Real income would fall by about $16 billion for families above the poverty line; that would reduce their total income by about 0.1 percent.”

In other words this is a policy that does a decent job of mitigating inequality and redistributing money downwards, with a fairly mild unemployment cost. (Many researchers believe that the best studies show that job losses from higher minimum wages are much lower than have long been assumed, and some have already disputed the CBO’s estimate of job losses.) Even if there are 1.7 million job losses, simply put those people to work “building walls” around the homes of Republican members of Congress, so that they cannot escape.

This CBO report prompted unfortunately powerful Republican Congressperson Virginia Foxx, who hates working people, to remark “That is unacceptable – one job lost is one too many.” Indeed, Republicans have a plan to put all Americans to work, in prison, for five cents an hour.