Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer explained why the Obama administration is so vehemently denying a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report projecting lost jobs from a minimum wage hike: The proposed White House policy would be “robbing the people it says it really wants to help.”
On Tuesday, the CBO said that President Barack Obama’s plan to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would result in a projected loss of around half a million American jobs. Despite years of touting CBO findings that fit their political narrative, The White House and congressional Democrats immediately sought to discredit the report and the non-partisan agency that issued it.
In an interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, Krauthammer explained why the Obama administration must discredit the CBO’s findings — which he claims are backed up by “years of economic studies.”
Krauthammer called it “obvious” that raising the minimum wage by a third would result in some job losses. “All that the CBO did was to give it a number, roughly half a million,” he said. “So what you get is a trade-off. Some of the people under minimum wage are going to get more income, and that’s good. And then there are going to be about half a million going from $7 an hour to $0. They’re going to be destitute.”
“It totally contradicts what Obama pretends his economic policy is,” he continued, “which is to give people the tools and the opportunity to climb into the middle class. That’s why the White House had to dismiss the numbers, even though they are obvious to everybody who can see them.”
“The irony is, the winners get a marginal advantage, but for the losers it’s devastation,” he later noted. “And you don’t really think about this administration sort of robbing the people it says it really wants to help.”
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