“In terms of potential job loss, there’s now a large economic literature on this, and much of it suggests that raising minimum wages … researchers often look at what happens if one state raises its minimum wage and a neighboring state leaves it alone to see how businesses fare in the two different places with different treatments, and the findings are that job loss is very minimal, if anything,” Yellen told members of the Senate Finance Committee in Washington throughout a partially virtual confirmation hearing.
“So I think that the likely impact on jobs is minimal. That’s my reading of the research.”
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The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated last year that increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour would completely destroy a minimum of 1.3 million jobs.
“By increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, it could shutter somewhere around 3.7 million jobs, on the high end. The last thing this economy needs, as we attempt to recover, is a loss of 1.3 to 3.7 million jobs,” Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) told Yellen, before prompting her answer by asking what she thought.
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Increasing the minimum wage would significantly boost the cost of doing business, destroy the chance to develop new jobs in rural America, and affect people seeking to enter the workforce, Scott said, calling it an “existential threat” to both restaurants and employees.
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Harsh limitations imposed to try to control the COVID-19 pandemic have led to millions of job losses over the past year, some of which haven’t returned yet.
“Right now, we have millions of American workers who are putting their lives on the line to keep their communities functioning, and sometimes even working multiple jobs and aren’t earning enough to put food on the table,” announced Yellen, who chaired the Federal Reserve throughout the Obama and Trump administrations. “And they’re suffering in countless ways, especially during this pandemic and really struggling to get by, and raising the minimum wage would really help many of those workers.”
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Scott differed with the nominee, commenting her words: “I would say that there is no doubt that when you artificially increase the minimum wage, you are going to permanently decrease the number of jobs in the economy.”
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Biden revealed a $1.9 trillion CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus plan last week that involves an increase in the federal minimum wage.
The plan’s fate in the Senate is uncertain, as other Republicans besides Scott have expressed reservations.
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