The Myth of Minimum Wage Killing Jobs

[D Gary Grady]

28. Not worthless. Not even a chart.

It's a table, and it's useful not in showing a full picture (which is indeed complex) but in discrediting the naive notion that raising the minimum wage lowers employment in some simplistic way. Research shows that a higher minimum wage stimulates the economy and this tends to offset an employment decrease. (It helps that labor demand is relatively inelastic.) Whether inflation results depends to a large degree where production stands in relation to productive capacity.

I assume your saying that inflation "has skyrocketed since the 1980s" is a typo or something. It was sky-high for several years around 1980 but has since been quite low. Re fast-food prices, circa 1975 a Burger King Whopper with cheese cost a dollar (leading me to jokingly propose Whopper Index at the time) and today it runs about $3.50. If it had risen with overall inflation, it would today cost around $4.34 (based on CPI-U).