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"Raising minimum wage risky," the Lexington Herald-Leader tersely warned. "Raising minimum wage strikes low-skill workers," the Detroit News bluntly announced. "Even left-leaning economists say it is a gamble," Vox solemnly cautioned. We've been raising the minimum wage for 78 decades, and as a fresh study clearly reveals, 78 decades of minimum-wage lifts have generated zero evidence of the "Job-killing" consequences these headline writers want us to fear.

In a first-of-its-kind report, researchers at the National Employment Law Project pore over employment statistics from each federal increase since the minimum wage was first established, making "Simple before-and-after comparisons of job-growth trends 12 months following each minimum-wage increase." Of the nearly two dozen federal minimum-wage hikes since 1938, total year-over-year employment increased 68 percent of the time.

In these industries most affected by the minimum wage, job increases were more common: 73 percent of the time in the retail sector, 82 percent at leisure and hospitality. "These basic economic indicators reveal no correlation between federal minimum-wage increases and reduced employment levels," the authors write. In fact the statistics indicate that increases in the federal minimum appeared to encourage job growth and hiring. Perhaps even more striking, of the only eight times that total or industry-specific employment dropped following a minimum-wage increase, the US economy was already in recession, technically just emerging from recession, or about to head into recession.

Certainly, this handful of employment downturns will be better clarified by the normal business cycle than by the minimal wage. "As these results reflect the findings of decades of more sophisticated academic research," the authors conclude, "They offer simple confirmation that opponents continuing predictions of job losses are suspended in ideology, not evidence." Although there is not any evidence that raising the minimum wage would be the "Risky" "Gamble" which doomsayers describe, the devastating economic expenses of keeping wages too low are very well documented. Following decades of stagnant wages, 73 million Americans - nearly one quarter of our population - reside in households entitled to the Earned Income Tax Credit, a benefit only accessible to the working poor.

According to some 2014 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, rising income inequality knocked 6 to 9 percent off US economic expansion within the past two decades. When the US economy were 9% larger than it is today, it might have generated about 11 million additional jobs. Imagine how good that will be to both the American workers and businesses. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that there's no limit to how high we could increase the minimum wage. Minimum-wage opponents are not currently haggling over a number. They are not currently creating a more powerful debate that the minimum wage may be bad for many people if it is too high or phased in too fast or if the economy isn't too weak to absorb the shift.

No, their heart claim is that the minimum wage always strikes the whole economy - that it'll always reduce expansion- that it's always a sure-fire "Job-killer." For decades, our minimum-wage argument has been dominated by ideology - the zero-sum claim that if wages go up, occupation must go down - leading progressives to believe that the minimum wage will be at best a necessary trade-off between fairness and expansion. On the contrary: When workers have more money, businesses have customers and hire more workers. That's the virtuous cycle which has always described the manner market economies really work. So if you are really concerned about murdering jobs, then our current $7.25-an-hour minimal wage is arguably far more expensive than $15. Nick Hanauer is the coauthor of two best-selling books in politics, "The True Patriot" and "The Gardens of Democracy." His opinion pieces have been featured in The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, Democracy Journal, and other publications.

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