Five Arguments Against Raising the Minimum Wage. Here's Why I Think They're All Wrong.

I keep hearing the same five arguments against raising the minimum wage. From podcasts, from business owners, from politicians, from people on the internet who took one econ class in college and now think they're Milton Friedman. So I want to go through each one and explain why I think they're wrong — not with theory, but with actual numbers and some common sense.


"Raising the minimum wage kills jobs."

This is the big one. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2019 that raising the federal minimum to $15 would eliminate 1.3 million jobs. Sounds terrifying until you read the fine print: the CBO's own confidence interval ranged from zero job losses to 3.7 million. Zero is literally within the range of expected outcomes (CBO, "The Effects of a Minimum Wage Increase on Employment and Family Income," 2019).

Meanwhile, the most rigorous academic research says the opposite. Card and Krueger's landmark study compared New Jersey and Pennsylvania after New Jersey raised its minimum wage. Fast food employment actually grew more in New Jersey (Card & Krueger, "Minimum Wages and Employment," American Economic Review, 1994). Dube, Lester, and Reich spent 16 years comparing neighboring counties across state borders and found "strong earnings effects and no employment effects" (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2010). Multiple meta-analyses since then have reached the same conclusion: moderate minimum wage increases don't cause meaningful job losses.

But forget the studies for a second. Think about how businesses actually work. Every business I've ever worked in — restaurants, retail, military operations — runs as lean as humanly possible already. They hire the minimum number of people they need to keep the doors open. They cut hours wherever they can. They're already doing that. The idea that they're carrying extra people on payroll out of the goodness of their hearts and will suddenly fire them when wages go up doesn't match reality.


"It hurts small businesses."

Here's the part nobody talks about: when you give low-income workers more money, they spend it. Immediately. The Penn Wharton Budget Model found that the lowest-income households spend 55 cents of every additional dollar they receive. The highest-income households? Twelve cents (Penn Wharton Budget Model, BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey).

That's not a small difference. Low-income workers are four and a half times more likely to spend an extra dollar than wealthy people. And where do they spend it? At local businesses. The corner store. The restaurant down the street. The barber. The mechanic. That money doesn't sit in a savings account or get wired to an offshore fund. It goes straight back into the local economy.

So yes, a small business might pay more in wages. But they're also getting more customers with more money to spend. Dollar velocity — the speed at which money changes hands in an economy — goes up when the people at the bottom have more to spend.


"Minimum wage was never meant to be a living wage."

I heard this argument on the Impact Theory podcast once. The host was making the case that minimum wage is a stepping stone — it's for teenagers, for people building skills, for workers on their way to something better. And I get the logic on paper.

But here's what the data says: 57% of minimum wage workers are 25 or older (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024). Not teenagers. Adults. People with bills and families and rent due on the first of the month.

And not everyone is going to become a manager. I know people who are great at their jobs — reliable, show up every day, do exactly what's asked of them — but they're never going to be in management. They don't have the personality for it, or they don't want it, or the opportunity just isn't there. There are roughly 14 non-management workers for every manager in the U.S. (BLS Occupational Employment Statistics, 2024). That means for every person who moves up, 13 people stay where they are.

So what are we saying — those 13 people don't deserve to start a family? They don't deserve to buy a house? They're supposed to work full-time for the rest of their lives and accept that they'll never be able to afford a decent life because they're not "management material"?

The minimum wage sets a floor. And that floor matters because without it, companies will gaslight you into thinking $18 an hour is generous. If the minimum is $7.25, then $15 sounds great. If the minimum is $15, then $18 sounds reasonable. But $18 an hour is $37,440 a year before taxes. MIT's Living Wage Calculator shows that's not enough for a single parent with one child in most American cities. It's barely enough for a single adult in expensive metros. That's not a living. That's survival.

And here's the kicker: the federal minimum wage of $7.25 hasn't changed since 2009. If you adjust the 1968 minimum wage for inflation, it would be $15.29 today (Department of Labor, BLS CPI data). The minimum wage has lost more than half its purchasing power in 58 years. We're not asking for a raise. We're asking to get back to where we were before most of us were born.


"It causes inflation."

A UC Berkeley study examined supermarket scanner data from 2001 to 2012 and found that a 10% increase in the minimum wage leads to a 0.36% increase in grocery prices (UC Berkeley, "Pass-Through of Minimum Wages into Retail Prices"). Let me put that in real terms: if minimum wage goes up 10% and your grocery bill goes from $200 to $200.72 — that's the inflationary impact. Seventy-two cents.

Now look at the other side of the equation. Walmart made $21.9 billion in net profit in 2025 (Walmart Inc. Annual Report). If they raised wages by $5 an hour across their lowest-paid workers, the estimated cost would be $2 to $3 billion — roughly 10 to 15% of their annual profit. They wouldn't go bankrupt. They wouldn't have to close stores. They'd make slightly less money.

But they won't do it voluntarily. Because corporate America doesn't optimize for "enough." It optimizes for "more." Every quarter, every earnings call, the question is: did margins grow? And when you're already making billions, the only ways to grow margins are: raise prices, cut costs on supplies, or pay your workers less. When the first two hit a wall, guess which lever gets pulled?

That's not an inflation argument. That's a greed argument dressed up in economic language.


"The market should set wages."

If a job is worth $10 an hour, who exactly decided that? Because it wasn't the worker. The worker doesn't get to say "my time is worth being able to start a family and own a home." The company decides, based on what they can get away with paying. And what they can get away with paying is directly tied to what the legal minimum is.

People point to Target, Amazon, and Costco raising starting pay above $15 on their own as proof the market works. But think about why they did it: they had to. They couldn't find enough workers during the post-pandemic labor shortage. The second there are more workers than jobs, that voluntary generosity disappears.

That's exactly why we need a minimum wage. When workers have less bargaining power — which is most of the time — the floor is the only thing protecting them. Without it, we'd be back to whatever companies could get away with. And we already know what they'd get away with, because they fought against the $7.25 minimum when it passed in 2007.

If you're 30 years old and you're working full-time, you deserve to be able to afford a life. Not a luxury life. A life. A place to live that isn't falling apart. The ability to take your kid to the doctor. Maybe a used car that runs. That shouldn't be a controversial position.

But somewhere along the way, we decided that if you're not climbing the ladder, you don't deserve the basics. And I just fundamentally disagree with that.


Data sources: Congressional Budget Office — "The Effects of a Minimum Wage Increase on Employment and Family Income" (2019), Card & Krueger — "Minimum Wages and Employment" (American Economic Review, 1994), Dube, Lester & Reich — minimum wage border study (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2010), Penn Wharton Budget Model / BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey (marginal propensity to consume), Bureau of Labor Statistics — "Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers, 2024," BLS Occupational Employment Statistics (manager-to-worker ratio), MIT Living Wage Calculator, Department of Labor (federal minimum wage history), UC Berkeley — "Pass-Through of Minimum Wages into Retail Prices," Walmart Inc. Annual Report (2025 net income).