500,000 Kentucky Workers Would Benefit From Raising the Minimum Wage

And that's just directly, not counting the boost to the economy from workers spending their higher wges.

From Down With Tyranny:




Zandar adds:

Over at Nate's House O' Numbers, econ writer Ben Casselman crunches the data on who exactly earns minimum wage.  Republicans contend that it's mostly teenagers and college kids living at home earning under $10.10 an hour (the level Democrats in Congress want to raise the minimum wage to), Democrats argue the majority of these low-wage workers are single-income people supporting a household.

Not surprisingly, it turns out the Democrats are right.

According to the survey, in 2013 more than 25 million people earned less than $10.10 an hour, which amounts to an annual salary of roughly $21,000. That’s nearly eight times the number of Americans who work for the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or less. Low-wage workers tend to be older than their minimum-wage counterparts: Nearly 60 percent, or 15 million Americans, of this group is 25 years old or older compared to about half of minimum-wage workers.

So these aren't teenagers, and Republicans are ignorant.  Shocking, I know.

What we really want to know, however, isn’t how old these workers are — it’s how many of them are trying to support themselves and their families on these wages. 

SNIP 

Based on that definition, there were 13 million Americans, out of the 25 million low-wage earners, who were trying to support themselves on less than $10.10 per hour in 2013. Some 4.5 million of them were also raising children.

More than half of people earning under $10.10 an hour are trying to live on that wage.