One year, in 2006, we looked at Arizona state minimum wage proposal, which was a 30 percent increase in the state minimum wage. At the time, it was $5.15, and it was being proposed to be raised to $6.75. [...] And what we did is we went and we looked to see how much would this cost businesses. We looked at what are the wages of workers at the time, how many hours did they work. We added that all up. We looked at payroll taxes and how much that would go up for employers. [...] What we found is, for the average business in Arizona, that the cost increase would be less than 0.1 percent. And so if you want to think about it in real concrete terms, businesses, by raising their prices by less than 0.1 percent, would be able to cover all the costs of a minimum-wage increase of a size of 30 percent.

During my Senate campaign, I ate a number 11 at McDonald's many, many times a week, and I know the price on that one, $7.19. According to the data on the analysis of what would happen if we raised the minimum wage to $10.10 over three years, the price increase on that item would be about $0.04. So instead of being $7.19, it would be $7.23. Are you telling me that's unsustainable?

One of the big arguments you'll hear from low-wage employers trying to keep the minimum wage as a poverty wage is that raising it would be bad for workers because it would lead to job losses. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Jeannette Wicks-Lim, a research assistant professor at the UMass-Amherst (the H is silent, contrary to what you hear here) Political Economy Research Institute, both challenge that claim . Wicks-Lim tells The Real News that:Similarly, Warren pushed a restaurant owner on the numbers:Meanwhile, Minnesota is considering raising its state minimum wage to $9.95 an hour, and state Rep. Jason Meta is taking a minimum wage challenge with Working America, trying to find out a little about what it's like to live on $7.25 an hour. As we know from food stamp challenges, the fact is that you don't find out the hardest stuff when you're just doing it as an experiment for a week—you don't live with deep-seated uncertainty, don't worry about what happens if you get sick and need something you can't afford on a food stamp or minimum wage budget. But the stuff you do learn is very much worth having in the policy debate.