Feds: $10.10 zaps poverty
WASHINGTON — Boosting the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would improve the earnings of 16.5 million Americans, and lift nearly a million people out of poverty, a nonpartisan study concluded Tuesday.
It would mean $5 billion a year more in income for families now living below the federal poverty line, and it would bring $12 million a year to families living not far above that level.
But the analysis, by the Congressional Budget Office, also projected a downside — the potential loss of 500,000 jobs, many held by low-income workers.
The analysis turbocharged a heated election-year debate, with Democrats trying to portray ortray Republican opposition to o a minimum wage hike as an affront to working Americans.
The budget office said its estimate of job losses was approximate, , and that the actual impact ct would likely range from ma a very slight reduction in jobs obs to the loss of as many as 1 million positions.
Democrats and the White House charged that the job-loss projections are overblown and outweighed by the benefits to workers and the economy as lowpaid employees use their higher incomes to spend more money.
They cited other studies that conclude employment would not be re reduced.
“These estimates do n not reflect the overall consensus view of economists, which is that raising the minimum wage has little or no negative effect on employm ment,” two of President Oba Obama’s economic advisers wrot wrote. Republicans seized on the study’s job-loss projections.
“With unemployment Americans’ top concern, our focus should be creating, not destroying, jobs for those who need them most,” said an aide to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).
There has been an emerging consensus that raising the wage has “little or no negative effect on the employment of minimumwage workers,” as put by one assessment of more than 600 economists. Yet some economists still hold to a traditional notion that hiking wages means increasing employer and consumer costs, eventually impacting sales and hiring.