Here's what happened [video here] in a Senate HELP Committee hearing on the bill to gradually increase the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour in three annual steps, and then link future increases in the minimum wage to the cost of living, in a nutshell.

• "a predictable adjustment process is something we should all be able to agree on"

• The price of a #11 combo at McDonald's would go up, from $7.19 to $7.23.

• Kitchen workers at full service restaurants would likely face a slight offset in wage gains with reduced hours.

• Ranking Republican Alexander cites a study to support some hyperbolic allegory.

More about that last point after the break...

continued...

So, are we about to "saw off the first rung of the ladder of economic success?" Alexander cites this study which tweaks this study by measuring total hours instead of total employment to achieve the desired talking point. See bullet point #3 above.

The researcher in the video above being questioned by Senator Warren is Arin Dube, who "take[s] stock of how the authors’ central theses [mentioned by Seantor Alexander] have stood the test of time" here.

There are some obvious virtues for the state panel approach, since it uses a lot more variation than an individual case study. However, it also assumes that we can find enough control variables to include in our regression that will make Texas look like Massachusetts. As it turns out, this is a heroic assumption that badly biases the results... A telltale sign of this flaw that our studies revealed is that in the state panel model, the job losses occur substantially prior to the actual change in policy.

The other guy in the video is a CT state Rep. that owns some breweries. See bullet point #3 above.