Super-Sized Strawman

Wednesday, June 29th, 2005

Super-Sized Strawman lists some facts about minimum wage:

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 63 percent of workers who make the minimum wage or less receive raises that put them above the minimum-wage level within one year of employment. Only 15 percent of workers still earn the minimum wage after a period of three years.

Are there teeming masses of starving minimum-wage earners throughout the nation? Actually, minimum-wage-earners comprise only 3.0 percent of all workers paid by the hour in the United States and only 1.8 percent of American wage and salary earners .

A great portion of minimum wage-earners are young people — more than business-bashing activists would have you believe. ‘Just three out of 10 of those earning minimum wage are youths,’ writes left-wing columnist Mark Shields. ‘Seventy percent of minimum-wage earners are adults ages 20 or older.’ Shields’s use of the word youths is misleading.

It’s true that 27.5 percent of minimum-wage-earners are sixteen- to nineteen years old. But it’s equally true that those ranging in ages sixteen to twenty-four make up 52.6 percent of minimum-wage workers.

According to a July 2004 study by Joseph Sabia and Richard Burkhauser, only 5.3 percent of U.S. minimum-wage-earners come from households that are below the official U.S. poverty line. Some 40 percent of U.S. minimum-wage-earners live in households where the total yearly income is at least triple the maximum amount of income a household can receive and still be classified as being below the poverty line. And 63 percent of those who earn the minimum wage are not the highest income-earner in their household.

Finally, over 82 percent of minimum-wage-earners are childless or are not the highest income-earner of their household.

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