For more than a century, advocates have promoted minimum wage laws to protect workers
and their families from poverty. Opponents counter that the policy has, at best, small poverty-
reducing effects. We summarize the evidence and describe three factors that might dampen
the policy's effects on poverty: imperfect targeting, heterogeneous labor market effects, and
interactions with income support programs. To boost the poverty-reducing effects of the
minimum wage, we propose increasing the federal minimum wage to $12 per hour and …