The CBO released a study today that obliterated the Republican argument against raising the minimum wage. Republicans retaliated by trying to distort the report, but they can’t explain away the bad news for the GOP.
Republicans have pounced on the CBO estimate that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would cost 500,000 jobs, but this is what the CBO actually wrote in their report, “Once fully implemented in the second half of 2016, the $10.10 option would reduce total employment by about 500,000 workers, or 0.3 percent, CBO projects. As with any such estimates, however, the actual losses could be smaller or larger; in CBO’s assessment, there is about a two-thirds chance that the effect would be in the range between a very slight reduction in employment and a reduction in employment of 1.0 million workers.”
The CBO’s conclusion on employment is that their could be a negative effect, or a zero effect. The CBO report is not a definitive statement that raising the minimum wage will kill jobs. In fact, the research on unemployment as summarized by seven Nobel Prize winners and 600 economists found that moving to $10.10 an hour will have little or no impact on employment.
The CBO also found that increasing the minimum wage will help the middle class and working poor:
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