EconoFact Chats

Over 10 million children in the United States live in poverty. Poor children tend to have worse physical and mental health, worse educational outcomes, and lower lifetime earnings than their peers. On this episode of EconoFact Chats, University of Maryland professor Melissa Kearney joins Michael Klein to discuss the scope and causes of child poverty in the U.S., and the policy efforts to alleviate it.

Florida overwhelmingly voted to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour; and nationwide surveys suggest that two-thirds of Americans support increasing the federal minimum wage. As broad support for this policy grows, understanding who benefits from increases to the minimum wage becomes more important. On this episode of EconoFact Chats, Michael Klein speaks with Jonathan Meer at Texas A&M University, whose research spans many areas of economics, among them, the effects of raising the minimum wage. The discussion focuses on whether minimum wage increases help low-income workers, whether they lead to job losses or reductions in other job-related benefits, and which policy options might do more to help workers at the lower end of the wage distribution.