Raising the minimum wage is the kind of cheap policy proposal politicians love. In a wave of their legislative hand, they can boast they have given millions of Americans a pay raise. It’s an emotional issue powerful enough to stand up to decades of economic research. Most Americans are decades-away from the kinds of jobs that make up the minimum wage workforce, blunting the obvious implications of federally mandated wages. Still, like all other government mandates, a wage hike sets off unintended consequences that end up harming the very people politicians say they are trying to help. Let’s set aside the economic arguments against raising the minimum wage. The issue is the poster-child for both side’s ability to torture statistics enough to confess anything. The simple truth is that minimum wage workers are such a small amount of the workforce today, that the macro-economic effects are relatively small either way. On the margins, and for certain populations, however, the impacts can be devastating. The basic problem with the issue is that we literally don’t know what we’re talking about. Obama and other supporters of mandated wage hikes spin a Dickensian landscape of millions of workers struggling to raise families on