THE NEWS SAYS:

Raise wage, ignore “squishy” job-loss talk.

With the well-being of America’s working poor hanging in the balance, the Congressional Budget Office has issued a destructive and ill-founded report on raising the minimum wage. The CBO analyzed President Obama’s proposal to boost base pay to $10.10 an hour, confirming the documented good that would follow but also venturing off into well disputed guesswork about its impact on jobs.

The CBO calculated that raising the wage from its present $7.25 level would lift 900,000 Americans out of poverty while putting an additional $19 billion into the pockets of people at the bottom of the ladder.

These huge benefits are a matter of basic arithmetic: Armies of workers would be paid an extra $2.85 an hour — translating directly into bigger paychecks and higher standards of living.

But the CBO’s second finding — that employers would respond by eliminating an estimated 500,000 jobs — is beyond squishy.

It takes for granted that businesses will simply lay people off instead of cutting expenses elsewhere, accepting marginally smaller profits or passing along costs to their customers.

It gives short shrift to the stimulative effect of putting billions more into consumers’ pockets — which would boost demand for goods and services and, as night follows day, create jobs.

It ignores studies that compared localities that raised their minimum wages with neighboring areas that stayed flat — and found no significant effect on employment.

In fact, more than 600 leading economists, including seven Nobel laureates, have co-signed a letter endorsing Obama’s minimum wage plan.

“The weight of evidence now (shows) that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimumwage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market,” they wrote.

Balance the facts against speculation, and the answer is clear: Congress should raise the wage.