Prof. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has been following the economic nonsense concerning Senator Elizabeth Warren’s claim that the minimum wage should be $22 an hour.

Let’s do some math.

There are roughy 135 million workers in the U. S. 22 bucks an hour works out to around $45,000 year, which would give a total U. S. payroll of a bit more than $6 trillion. That’s just about equal to the total of all wages and salaries paid in the country last year. In other words, in a struggling economy business would have to drastically reduce their unskilled minimum wage employment in order to have money left over to pay their skilled employees. One consequence of increasing the minimum wage is to outlaw jobs for workers with lower skills, increasing unemployment and slowing economic growth.