“Fox’s Bill O’Reilly downplayed the impact of raising the minimum wage, claiming only an”infinitesimal” number of people would be impacted, and ignoring the 27.8 million Americans that would benefit from a raise in the minimum wage.
During the January 20 State of the Union address, President Obama urged members of Congress to raise the minimum wage, saying those “who still refuse[] to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest working people in America a raise.”
On the January 21 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly and network contributor Eric Shawn undermined President Obama’s minimum wage initiative, and diminished the number of Americans that would be impacted by raising the minimum wage. O’Reilly asserted that only “a very low number” of people make “minimum wage anyways,” claiming that the number of people who would be impacted by the change would be “infinitesimal” and saying Obama has been “misleading everybody” by insisting a raise would have a big effect:”
Watch the clip here: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/01/21/bill-oreilly-downplays-impact-of-minimum-wage-i/202230
John Iadarola (http://www.twitter.com/jiadarola), Ben Mankiewicz (http://www.twitter.com/benmank77), and Ana Kasparian (http://www.twitter.com/anakasparian) of The Young Turks discuss.
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Comments
Belamella I totally agree with your point but wouldn’t O’reilly had been 16 in 1965? Your right on the minimum wage part though $1.25 which adjusted for inflation would be $9.39 today!!
Its crazy how he brags about how he got along just fine with minimum wage then and “kids” today should be fine too. Because cost of living and advancing in this world is completely the same as it was in the post WWII boom years…
Not to mention that his minimum wage adjusted for inflation is oddly close to what Obama wants to raise the minimum wage to today.
FOX news….happily distorting the facts since 1996
The economy we live in today is completely different then when Bill O’Reilly was working minimum wage. The purchasing power parity of the dollar has shrunk considerably while the price of energy and food has risen. Sure the cost of consumer electronics is cheaper now, but you can’t eat a tv.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0774473.html
In 1996 Bill O’Reilly would have been 16. The federal minimum wage was $1.25 an hour-which is $6.05 in 1996 constant dollars. In 2014 the federal minimum wage was $7.25-which is $4.82 in 1996 constant dollars. So people today aren’t even making as much money on minimum wage as he was when he was a kid.