On Fox’s Your World, host Neil Cavuto discussed the minimum wage and union-backed protestors calling for wage hikes in the usual “fair and balanced” way: by denigrating them. He showed a clip of protesters chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho. Poverty wages have got to go.” That was all the “other side” Fox News thought necessary to “balance” Cavuto’s very friendly interview with Sen. John Thune (R-SD). But first, Cavuto made fun of the protesters.
“You call that a chant? A protest? Come on guys! Put a little oomph into it!” Cavuto said. He told Thune, “I don’t know if you had a chance to hear those protestors, they just didn’t seem to be into it.” Sen. Thune chuckled.
Something tells me that if the protesters had been loud and enthusiastic, Cavuto would have called them angry or screechy. But any truly fair and balanced discussion would have had Cavuto or a reporter go to the protest and interview at least one representative.
Instead, it was off to bashing President Obama - and advancing a "give more money to the wealthy" mindset. Thune said:
What the President’s doing, Neil, he’s betting it all on a policy that everybody says would cost jobs and raise prices for people in this country. The Congressional Budget Office said that the minimum wage increase the President is supporting would cost us up to a million jobs. Why would we be doubling down on policies that we know are going to cost jobs, and study after study shows that. So we think that’s a bad approach, and what the President ought to do is work with us on policies that actually make it less expensive to hire workers.
Thune also said that raising the minimum wage would “cost the economy up to a million jobs,” “raise prices,” and put “another layer of cost on top of the economy that gets translated all through the economy, and it’s just going to affect every small business in America.”
Once again, a box on the right of the screen said differently. It said the CBO estimates raising the minimum wage would reduce total employment by 500,000 workers, not a million.
But there’s data to indicate neither the Senator nor the box gave the full picture. According to Think Progress, raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2016 raises wages by $35 billion, creates 85,000 jobs, and would lift almost 6 million people out of poverty.
(A December 19, 2013) report finds that 27.8 million workers would get a raise with a higher wage. Author David Cooper looked at this boost in spending while accounting for any increased labor costs for employers and potentially small price increases for consumers and still found that an increase would give growth a bump.
Other studies have found that raising the minimum wage would be good for growth, such as one from the Chicago Fed that found raising the minimum wage to $9 an hour would increase consumer spending by $28 billion, even with the possibility of job losses taken into consideration, increasing GDP by 0.2 percent.
On the other hand, research has shown that the claim that a raise will hurt jobs and businesses doesn’t hold much water. Five recent studies have found that increasing the wage during periods of high unemployment doesn’t have a negative impact on job growth, and states that raised their wages even had job growth slightly above the national average. In fact, increasing the minimum wage can have positive effects on businesses such as increasing demand for goods and services, encouraging employees to work harder, and reducing turnover and the costs of hiring and training new workers.
Maybe the Senator should try living on $7.25 an hour.