Raising the minimum wage is one of the most popular policies across the political spectrum — it sounds costless. Someone earning $10 an hour now earns $15, and the employer pays the difference. But that intuition assumes employers keep the same number of workers at the new price, which is rarely what the data shows.
When Seattle raised its minimum wage toward $13 in 2016, University of Washington researchers found that hours worked in low-wage jobs fell more than wages rose, reducing the total paychecks of the very workers the policy targeted. That isn't an isolated finding. The Congressional Budget Office (2021) projected a federal $15 minimum would lift about 900,000 Americans above the poverty line — and cost roughly 1.4 million jobs.
The tradeoff isn't that minimum wages are always bad. Modest increases in strong labor markets are usually absorbed with little visible harm. The myth is that they're always good, for everyone, automatically. They aren't. They help some workers and push others — the least-skilled, the youngest, workers in weaker regions — out of the labor market entirely.
The real debate isn't whether to raise the floor. It's at what level, how fast, and who bears the cost. That's a conversation the slogan skips.