To listen to the Clinton administration, the typical minimum-wage worker is a sole breadwinner struggling to raise a family in poverty, who will receive a $2,000 bonus from the proposed $1-an-hour hike (“Clinton parodies Gov. Bush, bashes GOP agenda,” News, July 30).
This simply is not true.
According to Census Bureau data, the average family income of workers affected by the proposed minimum-wage hike is $39,564 a year. Of course, there are some families trying to get by on a single minimum-wage salary and government assistance. Ironically, they will see less of the minimum-wage hike than the teenagers living in middle-class families due to wage-triggered reductions in government benefits.
For example, new research from professor Daniel Shaviro of New York University Law School shows that a teenager or childless adult under 25 would take home approximately $1,500 of a $1 minimum wage hike over a year. By contrast, a single mother of two, working full-time in a state that offers generous public-assistance benefits, would enjoy only $52 of the $2,000 a year in extra earnings the president is promising. Worse than not helping, the wage hike is likely to hurt the very groups its proponents claim they want to help. New research from Dr. David Neumark of Michigan State University and his colleagues at the Federal Reserve documented that minimum-wage hikes increase the number of poor and near-poor families by depriving them of work opportunities. According to the economists, the data indicate that employers likely responded to the hikes by “first laying off part-time workers…and then later adjusting hours of the remaining low-wage workers.”
