I hate to bash the media twice in one day, but this lead paragraph is terrible, biased journalism:

“After not budging for 10 years, the federal minimum wage could be going up, increasing paychecks for hundreds of thousands of janitors, fast food clerks and other workers at the bottom of the wage scale.”

Yup, that’s the debate! Do we pay people more, or not? No tradeoffs here.

But as I said in response to a commenter on my blog:

People don’t live off minimum wage often, at least not here in the USA. Minimum wage workers are frequently teenagers, or married people pulling in some extra money.

Also, regardless of whether it’s livable, minimum wage does little if anything to help the poor. The philosophy is that you force employers to pay more, and they reach in their big bags of money, do so and keep on as before.

But in fact, it’s undeniable that minimum wage hikes cost people their jobs. Rather than pay people more, business owners have to fire some of them — this is especially true of small business owners who operate at slim profit margins to begin with. If an employee creates $6 in value per hour, it’s worthwhile to hire him at $5.15. It’s not at $7.25.

So the tradeoff is between some people getting fired and others getting paid a little more, with most of these people not even living on the jobs they’re in. For a long time the consensus was that job losses far overcame the wage increases. But now there are some economists who make the argument that the wage increases outweigh the job loss in terms of poverty reduction, so I’m not saying either side is right.

It’s completely irrelevant, however, whether you can “live on” $5.15. It’s a lot harder to live on nothing.

Most of the facts I discussed here are in this article, hat tip Andrew Sullivan:
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/12/can-600-economists-all-be-wrong.html

…Yet AP/CBS puts it front and center that fast-food workers will make more, without mentioning that some will get fired. That’s called “liberal bias,” folks. It’s also callousness in the face of a policy that could hurt the poor.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com.