The Wall Street Journal editorial board pushed long-debunked myths about the minimum wage, misleadingly criticizing the growing support for increasing the minimum wage as economically destructive.

In a December 5 editorial, the Journal criticized President Obama's support of increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, claiming that the move would harm the economy and the job market. After lamenting the passage of a number of recent state-level minimum wage hikes, The editorial concluded:

Our readers are familiar with the mountains of evidence that minimum wages lead to fewer workers hired. Small minimum-wage hikes have small negative employment effects, but raising a worker's cost by 50% or more risks pricing many low-skilled workers out of the job market.

While the Journal claims that there are “mountains of evidence” that support the claim that minimum wage hikes are harmful to the labor market, it never offers any specific proof about their broader impact. If it had actually looked at the “mountains of evidence” concerning minimum wage hikes, a different picture would emerge.

Research conducted by economists Paul Wolfson of Dartmouth and Dale Belman of Michigan State looked at a variety of studies published on the minimum wage since 2000. While some found negative employment effects and some found positive effects, their analysis concluded that across studies, there are no statistically significant negative hiring effects of increasing the minimum wage.

Furthermore, according to a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, while “employment responses generally cluster near zero,” the effect of a minimum wage hike on employment is “more likely to be positive than negative.”

Of course, nowhere in its editorial did the Journal note the positive effect a minimum wage increase would have on workers. According to the Economic Policy Institute, raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would increase the wages of about 30 million workers, 88 percent of whom are at least 20 years old.

In addition to the benefit of workers receiving higher wages, a minimum wage increase would also help the economy at large. According to the same EPI study, the increased spending power of workers would increase gross domestic product by about $32 billion and create approximately 140,000 jobs.

Given the fact that a growing majority of Americans support increasing the minimum wage, it's no wonder that the Journal is grasping at the same old myths.

Flickr Image Via The All-Nite Images.