Minimum Wage and Maximum Wealth, Part 3

Opponents of the minimum wage argue that increases lead to lost jobs for those at the bottom. But this interesting article from Bloomberg News raises questions about the conventional wisdom:

"My thinking on this has changed dramatically,'' says Alan Blinder, a former Federal Reserve vice chairman who teaches economics at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. "The evidence appears to be against the simple-minded theory that a modest increase in the minimum wage causes substantial job loss.''

Empirical research can enlighten even the most dismal science:

In a Wells Fargo-Gallup poll taken in March, 46 percent of small-business owners said the minimum wage should be increased, and 86 percent said the wage had no effect on them.
"The wage has been left at such a low level for so many years now that inflation has eroded it,'' says Scott Anderson, a senior economist at San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co., the fifth-biggest U.S. bank. "It's not as onerous to employers as it once was.''

Here's some more evidence from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
From 1979 to 2002, the percent of workers earning the minimum wage or below fell from 13.4 percent to 3.0 percent. The total number of workers earning the minimum or below fell from 6.9 million in 1979 to just under 2.2 million in 2002.