“I’m tired of hearing about the minimum wage,” New Jersey governor Chris Christie said Tuesday, adding to a list of a number of things, policy issues and otherwise, that he is tired of hearing about. It’s clear enough that he’s tired of hearing about the minimum wage because it’s a relatively bad, anti-market policy that command high levels of popular support — I hope he doesn’t tire of his position on it (he vetoed an increase in New Jersey’s $8.25 an hour minimum wage last year). But the Washington Post’s Fix thinks it’s caught an error in the explanation he offers. Here’s what he said:
I really am [tired of the issue.] I don’t think there’s a mother or a father sitting around the kitchen table tonight in America saying, ‘You know, honey, if our son or daughter could just make a higher minimum wage, my God, all of our dreams would be realized.’ Is that what parents aspire to?
Here’s WaPo’s response:
Christie is probably right, for two reasons. The first is the obvious one: no one aspires to make as little a salary as possible, although there are certainly people sitting around kitchen tables wishing for some salary at all. (As of last month, 9.3 million of them.) But he’s also right that no one is doing that — mostly because the image of minimum wage workers as teenagers, kids working at the soda fountain after school, is wrong.
Raising the minimum wage is expected, ceteris paribus, to increase that 9.3 million number, for one (or whatever number it is in New Jersey). But WaPo is also trying to attribute to the governor a common and more or less correct, argument against the minimum wage as a poverty-fighting or opportunity-creating policy: It’s mostly young people that hold minimum-wage jobs, so the level of the minimum wage doesn’t matter for most working Americans. But it seems more likely Christie was making an abstract argument: People aspire to rapid economic growth, broad opportunity, and rising wages for the next generation, rather than hoping that the government will merely bump up the legally required minimum salary. He’s not saying that, when people think about whether to support raising the minimum wage, parents literally think of whether it would improve their kid’s salary at the soda fountain.
The Fix thinks Christie has just claimed that most people making the minimum wage are young people, and they set about proving that he’s wrong and (like a typical Republican) stuck with a outdated understanding of the world. As the headline puts it, “Chris Christie needs to update his stereotypes about the minimum wage.” Unfortunately, they can’t prove Christie is adhering to some old-fashioned stereotype, because, while it can be exaggerated, it doesn’t appear to be outdated.
Citing this chart, they write: “As the recession took hold . . . the number of people earning a minimum wage swelled. . . . And as that wave hit the workforce, it was those over 25 years old who comprised the biggest part of the new minimum wage earners.” Yes, when the recession hit, there were more workers over 25 earning the minimum wage than there were between the ages of 16 and 25, by one percentage point — shocking. But as their chart happens to show, almost the same share of minimum-wage earners are over 25 vs. under 25 in 2012; at the beginning of the recession; and at the beginning of their data set in 2002 (see here and here). The age composition of minimum-wage workers hasn’t changed noticeably at all, so why are they pretending to have proved the stereotype outdated?
It is possible that over a longer time frame, minimum-wager workers are older now than they were in two decades, or three decades ago, or more, but this data isn’t readily presented by the BLS. (FiveThirtyEight’s Ben Casselman has found that minimum-wage earners are more likely now than in 1990s to be supporting themselves, but that does not necessarily indicate a shift in age.)
And this stereotype about the typical minimum-wage earner isn’t inaccurate, either. “It isn’t parents sitting around kitchen tables worried about their kids getting a bump in their minimum wage jobs,” the Fix writes. “Rather, it’s much more likely to be a young mother herself, hoping for a raise in her own paycheck.” This is nonsense. The modal minimum wage earner really is a teenager, and this group is wildly disproportionately represented among minimum-wage earners relative to the labor force as a whole. It’s exceedingly unlikely that someone earning the minimum wage is the primary earner, the bread-winner, for a family, as the Fix’s description seems to suggest. Data on how many minimum-wage earners are parents at all isn’t easily available, but the White House estimates that only a quarter of people earning under minimum wage have children, let alone are young mothers specifically — the people the Fix just presented as the typical minimum-wage worker.
None of this makes Chris Christie right or wrong about the minimum wage. But the argument the Fix attributes to him and the accompanying stereotype is still accurate enough to make raising the minimum wage a very poorly targeted way to help working families.