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Michael Franc at the Heritage Foundation busts some myths while demonstrating the folly of raising the minimum wage.

An enduring urban legend about minimum-wage workers is that they are married adults struggling to raise children in Dickensian-style poverty. As Kennedy said in a recent Senate floor speech, “Minimum-wage workers are forced to make impossible choices between paying the rent and buying groceries, paying the heating bills or buying clothes.” Their families, he said, lack health care and adequate housing. Their “daily fear” is “poverty, hunger and homelessness.”

The data, however, tell a very different story. While some minimum-wage workers are primary breadwinners raising young children, the overwhelming majority are either younger workers honing their skills in entry-level positions or part-time, mostly female workers from middle-class homes supplementing their spouse?s income.

• Only 1.9 million American workers (out of a total workforce of 127.4 million) earn the minimum wage. Most (63%) are women. More than half (53%) are between the ages of 16 and 24, and an even larger percentage (58%) work part-time.
• Upward mobility is the happy norm. Two out of three of today?s minimum-wage workers will earn 10% more within a year.
• Many are teenagers who live with their parents in middle-class homes. This explains why the average household income for minimum-wage earners is more than $40,000 a year and why only 19% (about 400,000 nationwide) fall below the poverty line.

 

 

minimum wage