At the Fox Business Network
debate, it didn’t take long for the topic of the minimum wage to come up.
During a back-and-forth with the
moderators, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson urged caution on
raising the minimum wage, saying, "People need to be educated on the
minimum wage. Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless
people increases."
We checked a similar claim by
Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md. In November 2014, Cardin made the opposite case,
claiming that "every time we've increased the minimum wage, we've seen a
growth in jobs."
We rated
Cardin’s claim Mostly False, after determining that during the 12 months
following each of the 11 minimum wage increases since 1978, about half produced
a net gain in jobs and about half produced a net loss of jobs.
In this case, we decided we
couldn’t rely on the exact same data, since Cardin referred to a growth in
jobs, while Carson referred to an increase in joblessness. Those aren’t exactly
the same things, though the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates both metrics.
So we used the same methodology
to look at the 12-month changes in unemployment level after those 11
minimum-wage hikes.
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