Minimum Wage Impacts
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I–VT) claims that “we have got to raise the minimum wage” to $17/hour because “we have millions of people in this country who are working for starvation wages that cannot afford housing.”
IN FACT, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that raising the minimum wage to $15/hour would give 81% of the resultant wage increases to families above the poverty line, destroy about 1.4 million jobs, spur inflation, increase taxes, and raise the average total income of households in poverty by only 1%.
