Terry Jeffrey writes in a Feb. 17 CNSNews.com article:
Sixty-four percent of Americans who earned the minimum wage or less in 2013 were 29 years old or younger, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and 63 percent worked in restaurants, bars or retail.
[…]
People 30 years or older equaled only about 36 percent of those who earned the minimum wage or less in 2013–and only 0.8 percent of the people employed in the United States.Of the 75,948,000 who were paid an hourly wage in 2013, 3,300,000 earned at or below the minimum wage.
That means only about 4.4 percent (3,300,000) of hourly wage earners (75,948,000) earned the minimum wage or less in 2013–or only about 2.3 percent (3,300,000) of all U.S. employees (143,929,000).
Jeffrey thus takes the latest line of attack peddled by other minimum-wage-raise opponents like Fox News — so few people earn minimum wage, so there’s no need to raise it.
But as Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert points out, that argument shoots down the normal conservative opposition to raising the minimum wage: “Because if hardly anyone makes minimum wage, than why the movement-wide opposition to changing it? If so few people earn minimum wage, why demagogue the issue and stand in the way of an increase?”
Jeffrey just undermined his own argument. Oops.