The Minimum-Wage Debate in Charts

Over at our Daily Comment blog, I’ve posted a piece about President Obama’s proposal to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00. (You won’t be surprised to find out that I’m in favor of it.) For anybody interested in the debate about the impact of minimum-wage laws, here are three of the charts I referred to.

The first one, courtesy of CNNMoney, shows the nominal and inflation-adjusted values of the minimum wage going back to 1938, when it came into effect at $0.25 an hour. The most notable thing about it is how the real value was raised sharply in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, then cut sharply in the seventies and eighties.

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