{"id":41890,"date":"2014-02-19T07:00:26","date_gmt":"2014-02-19T13:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=41890"},"modified":"2014-09-03T13:59:10","modified_gmt":"2014-09-03T18:59:10","slug":"sophies-raise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=41890","title":{"rendered":"Sophie’s Raise"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Congressional Budget Office has released one of those rare financial reports that has both sides crowing and declaring victory.<\/p>\n

Who you believe – or weight the highest – likely depends on your economic literacy, politics, and what you do for a living.<\/p>\n

The headline on NPR \u00a0– “CBO: Minimum Wage Hike Could Boost Paychecks \u2013 And Cut Jobs” – left wiggle room both ways:<\/p>\n

Whatever you already believed about raising the federal minimum wage, you now have more ammo for your argument, thanks to a report released Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office, titled\u00a0“The Effects of a Minimum-Wage Increase on Employment and Family Income.”<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes, you’re right: Raising the wage in steps to $10.10 an hour by 2016 would push employers to cut jobs \u2014 about 500,000 of them, says the CBO, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the one hand, according to one reading of the report, a hike to 10.10\/hour – about 40% – would “lift nearly 1 million” out of poverty, and put money into “wallets of workers who are eager to spend”, and give a “raise” to 16.5 million people.<\/p>\n

But then there’s those 500,000 jobs lost.<\/p>\n

By the way, that’s about the softest estimate you can imagine; the CBO report itself says “As with any such estimates, however, the actual losses could be smaller or larger; in CBO\u2019s assessment, there is about a two-thirds chance that the effect would be in the range between a very slight reduction in employment and a reduction in employment of 1.0 million workers” – meaning about a 30% chance that over a million jobs would be lost.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>I’d bet those odds.<\/p>\n

Oh, yeah – and “the poor” aren’t necessarily working for minimum wage, and it’s not “the poor” who’ll be getting most of the benefits:<\/p>\n

Just 19 percent of the $31 billion would accrue to families<\/p>\n

with earnings below the poverty threshold, whereas 29 percent would accrue to families earning more than three times the poverty threshold, CBO estimates.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s three dollars going to the middle class – mostly teenagers and other children of moderately well-off families – for every two going to “the poor” (that actually get to keep their jobs).<\/p>\n

So like the protagonist in “Sophies Choice”, what do you do? \u00a0Make life marginally easier for “the poor”, at the expense of creating many more of them?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Congressional Budget Office has released one of those rare financial reports that has both sides crowing and declaring victory. Who you believe – or weight the highest – likely depends on your economic literacy, politics, and what you do for a living. The headline on NPR \u00a0– “CBO: Minimum Wage Hike Could Boost Paychecks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[308,69],"tags":[283],"class_list":["post-41890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entitled-america","category-socialism","tag-minimum-wage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41890"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46935,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41890\/revisions\/46935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}