It’s time to talk numbers, but before this makes your eyes glaze over, I’ll make a promise. This discussion of the minimum-wage proposal will be the funniest discussion of federal poverty standards you’ve ever read.

I’m not too worried about that boast, because if I drop even one joke in the mix it will without a doubt be the funniest discussion of minimum-wage issues ever.

There is nothing that really impacts the average American more than money, and the minimum wage is the baseline by which most Americans judge their performance. Are you making more than minimum wage? Good, you’re on the way up.

So why does the proposal to boost Madison’s minimum wage have some tongues wagging? Well, because tongues wag in this town as a matter of habit, but mainly because in these tough economic times, if someone actually does something to improve the working man’s lot in life, well, they’re a communist.

See! I’m kidding. Ald. Austin King, District 8, former Ald. Tom Powell and UW-Madison senior Joe Lindstrom are advocating raising the minimum wage in this town to $7.75. This would be 50 percent higher than the federal minimum wage of $5.15 (which Wisconsin currently matches) and 60 cents higher than the highest state-mandated minimum wage ($7.15 in Alaska, home of the happiest McDonald’s employees in America).

Critics of this wage increase include Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, Scrooge McDuck and supply-siders everywhere.

Here’s what the Republican tax cut gave to the average family making $20,000 a year: $374. Here’s what the Democratic/ Progressive proposal gives to a working family earning minimum wage: $5,200. That figure was based on multiplying a 40-hour work week by 50 weeks of work for one year. Two weeks off is generous but makes it easier to multiply.

Now, a supply-sider, as any good Republican must be these days, would say, “Raising the minimum wage! That’s going to hurt small-business owners, who will lay off workers, defeating the purpose of the wage increase! Plus, small-business owners are the backbone of the American economy, and this will hurt their bottom line!”

Unfortunately, this is just not true. In a study commissioned to watch the effects of the last federal minimum-wage increase (which occurred in 1996, raising the minimum wage to the level we have today), the UW-funded research group Center for Wisconsin Strategies found that, “There has been no appreciable slowdown in the performance of Wisconsin’s now widely-envied “jobs machine” between 1995 and 1998, the years when the negative employment effects of a minimum wage hike would most likely have been seen at the state level. In fact, at the aggregate level (total non-farm employment), and in the two most wage-sensitive industry divisions (trade and services), Wisconsin’s statewide employment growth rate from March 1997 to March 1998 was higher than in the year preceding the first of the two minimum-wage increases (1995).”

In the grand tradition of reporting the facts, I decided to ask a small-business owner about this. Brad Werntz is a small-business owner right here in Madison, and for the sake of disclosure, my boss for the last two-and-a-half years. He’s the co-owner of Boulders Climbing Gym and employs nearly a dozen high school- and college-aged people. I asked what he thought a minimum-wage increase would do to small business owners like him.

“It doesn’t affect us much, because we pay better than minimum wage. Sometimes we have a hard time staffing, but this doesn’t seem to be based on wage rates,” Werntz said.

Let’s hear it from a different source. According to the Almanac of Policy Issues (a non-partisan clearing house for, well, policy issues) economist Robert Solow, an MIT Nobel Laureate, wrote in a 1995 New York Times article that the “main thing about the research is that the evidence of the job loss is weak … And the fact that the evidence is weak suggests the impact on jobs is small.”

The research in reference is the effect of minimum-wage increases on employment rates. The theory that minimum-wage increases cause a loss of jobs just doesn’t seem to be true.

In Dane County, according to the latest Census Bureau figures (which would be for 2002), 10.3 percent of Dane County residents were under the federal poverty level. The federal poverty level for a family of four with two dependents is $18,494. This figure jumps $4,000 per kid.

So for the family unit that Republicans prefer (husband working, wife at home, two kids, etc., etc.) a minimum wage of $7.75 means that with full-time employment, dad brings home $15,500 a year. Let’s say he works every single day of the year, never taking time off for a child’s illness, his own illness, Packer play-off, what have you. He still only makes $16,120. That’s $2,374 short of making the federal poverty level. Still, keep reaching for that rainbow!

The fact is, we are talking about working families and working people. People who are starting at the bottom. Literally. Nowhere to go but up, and we are arguing that their pay increase, which doesn’t even get them off the bottom of the barrel, is too much? It stretches the imagination to think of these people as taxing our system to the breaking point.

Rob Deters ([email protected]) is a second-year law student.