The Biggest Lies About A $15 Minimum Wage (Script & Sources)

Hi! When you think of people making minimum wage, do you think of a bored teenager flipping burgers or stocking groceries? Do you think that raising the minimum wage would kill small businesses, raise unemployment, and skyrocket inflation? Well congratulations, you’ve fallen victim to propaganda by the ultra-wealthy who would rather see the second highest child poverty rate in the developed world than stop bribing congress to keep blatant wage theft legal.

First of all, the average age of a minimum wage worker isn’t 16, it’s 35 - and they tend to be their family’s primary income source, not to mention a woman or a person of color, so actually keeping the minimum wage low hurts primarily adults who are already being financially and systemically disenfranchised. Plus, if only teenagers were minimum wage workers, how could any business stay open during school hours?

Ok, but won’t raising the minimum wage raise inflation because things will have to cost more to justify the increase? In the last 40 years we’ve had 11 minimum wage increases, and studies show that there is almost no correlation between a wage increase and inflation, most of the time inflation actually goes down, and that’s because the price of goods is based on demand and not solely on one part of a business’s overhead. And even the most generous statistical reading shows that for every 10% of wage increase prices would only increase by 0.36%. 

That means if the minimum wage went up to $15 an hour, the price of a Big Mac would go up just 17 cents. By the way, in Denmark, McDonald's workers make $22 an hour and have six weeks of paid vacation, to mention life insurance, healthcare, and pension, and their Big Macs cost LESS than they do in the United States.

Ready for some more lies about the minimum wage that billionaires are desperate for you to believe so they can keep syphoning away all of your labor? Me too!

So one thing anti-wage people like to say is that minimum wage isn’t supposed to be a living wage, it’s a starting wage and you’re supposed to work your way up - and the reason this is irredeemably stupid is because it was explicitly, without any ambiguity created to be a living wage, down to literally being called a “living wage” when it was created in 1938, word-for-word Roosevelt said “no business which depends on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country”. And he was right.

But what about small businesses? How can they afford to pay workers more money if they’re already struggling? By making more money because when the minimum wage goes up, small businesses see higher profits, because most people who utilize small businesses make minimum wage or near it! So rather than relying on financial exploitation to stay afloat while their customers can barely afford basic necessities, a higher minimum wage gives their customers the financial freedom to SUPPORT small businesses so they can grow. 67% of small business owners support a minimum wage increase for that exact reason!

In fact, across the board, when looking at states that independently raised their minimum wage, employment went up!

The reality is that the ONLY people hurt by raising the minimum wage are the top 1% who got there by exploiting workers and stealing the profits of their labor - it is outrageous to say that a person struggling to make ends meet doesn’t deserve $27 an hour, but Jeff Bezos does deserve 9 million dollars an hour. They’re literally hoarding all of our money! it’s really that simple, and there isn’t some giant loophole where paying people a living wage at the expense of the ultra-wealthy hurts the economy. You know what really hurts the economy? 142 million Americans living in poverty while billionaires outsource jobs to countries with even more exploitative wages so they can pay less in taxes than the middle class and use that money to artificially inflate the price of their own company through stock buybacks. That's killing the economy.