Reply to thread

That would be correct only under the assumption that the worker is living alone. For example if the worker had to support a family of four, that would mean all four are living in poverty, and an increase in minimum wage would aid four people.

If your 6% figure is accurate, and the average family size is 2.6 a very rough correction to that would indicate that 2.6 x 6% would benefit. I would argue that roughly 15.6% would benefit from an increased minimum wage under those assumptions.

That would partially explain why the 45.3 million living in poverty is so much higher than the minimum wage work force.

However, I still prefer to look at the statistics in a more straightforward way:

According to the DOL (http://www.dol.gov/minwage/) 28 million workers are at minimum wage. The labor force (May 2014) is 156 million. The result is about 18% (28/156) of the work force is at minimum wage.

I would argue that when you consider family size, a minimum wage increase for that 18% would have a very large benefit to American families.