In fact, the report said, 900,000 people would be lifted from poverty with a wage increase. The income of those below the poverty line would increase by a total of $5 billion, or 3 percent, at no cost to the federal budget.

The vast majority of those getting raises would not be teenagers with part-time jobs. Nearly 90 percent of them are adults 20 and older, and 53 percent of them work full time. Women represent 56 percent of them.

But the report said there could be a cost to the wage increase, and most of the headlines have focused on the possible loss of 500,000 jobs, or about 0.3 percent of total employment. That bears further scrutiny, because, unlike the benefits, the employment estimates have been disputed by a wide variety of nonpartisan economic studies.

What the report actually says is that there is a two-thirds chance that a $10.10 wage would produce job losses in a range from just above zero to one million. The number 500,000 was simply picked as a midpoint. (There is a one-third chance the wage increase would lead to more than a million job losses or actually increase employment.) A range that big is essentially the budget office’s way of saying it doesn’t really know what would happen to employment if the wage goes up, because, as the report says, there is vast uncertainty about how much wages will go up on their own over the next three years, and uncertainty about how employers would react to a higher minimum.

The budget office didn’t do its own research on those variables. It surveyed the economic literature on the subject, and chose a figure more conservative than the most recent and rigorous studies have found. That means the job-loss figure needs to regarded skeptically, as a careful reading of the report shows, while the benefits are undisputed.