It is an election year so we can expect both parties to play it fast and loose with the truth, while appealing to their bases baser instincts. Democrats played the minimum wage card this week.
Here are some other pesky facts that Dobbs failed to mention in his op-ed:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2002 report, of the 72.7 million hourly-wage workers in the US, only 2.2 million, a mere 3%, received minimum wages. While that's bad for them, it's not a national crisis.
Only 5.3% of minimum-wage workers come from families below the poverty line.
The highest proportion of minimum wage workers were in the retail trade (8%), whereas agriculture only claimed 2%.
The vast majority of minimum wage workers either have second jobs or live with other family members and are not sole-source providers of income.
Minimum wages provide artificial barriers to those seeking their first job experience. Unemployment among 16–19-year-olds was 17.3% in 2005, as opposed to 5.6% overall. When split out by ethnicity, Hispanic and black teens had unemployment rates of 25% and 40% respectively. Analysts have been railing for decades about the social effects of youth unemployment, without even considering as a potential causative factor the ever-increasing minimum wage during all that time.