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It's easy to simply cite the full figure and assume the solution is the raise minimum wage and think the impact will be large - but the data subsets are important.


The Census Bureau reports obviously states that there are 45.3 million people in poverty. But what do we know about these people from the dats subsets?


1) 35% (15.7 million people) of this group did not work single week during the year.

2) Only 6% (2.7 million people) of this group worked full time last year.


The Census Data gives us the numbers as an age range from 18-64, so it's more difficult to break down into age ranges and split out who makes minimum wage from these categories - but we know from the BLS stats a general concept of how many people would fit this criteria - a ballpark of 176,000 people. (25% of minimum wage earners over the age of 24 and living at the poverty level)


Meaning it seems reasonable to argue that only 6% of full time workers over the age of 24 make minimum wage and live at the poverty line - correct?


Therefore - I would argue blanket minimum wage increases really offer no substantial benefit to lifting people out of poverty - nor is the alleged "corporate welfare" provided to this group overly substantial in number.  If anything the vast majority of this alleged "subsidy" goes to the audience that doesn't work at all (or only part time). If you don't have a job and live in poverty it's irrelevant what the minimum wage is - bringing me back to where I maintain the focus must be placed...on jobs and pro-growth pro-business policies.


It's late and I'm reading these charts on an iPad - so it's possible I missed some of the data - but I'm not currently seeing where that might be.


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