Coupling a Federal Minimum Wage Hike with Public Investments to Make Work Pay and Reduce Poverty

For more than a century, advocates have promoted minimum wage laws to protect workers and their families from poverty. Opponents counter that the policy has, at best, small poverty-reducing effects. We summarize the evidence and describe three factors that might dampen the policy’s effects on poverty: imperfect targeting, heterogeneous labor market effects, and interactions with income support programs. To boost the poverty-reducing effects of the minimum wage, we propose increasing the federal minimum wage to $12 per hour and temporarily expanding an existing employer tax credit. This is a cost-saving proposal because it relies on regulation and creates no new administrative functions. We recommend using those savings to “make work pay” and improve upward mobility for low-income workers through lower marginal tax rates.