1.4 unemployed vs 900K out of poverty?

CBO: Minimum wage boost would increase deficit, cost jobs

A Democratic plan to more than double the federal minimum wage over five years would increase federal deficits by $54 billion over a decade, the Congressional Budget Office said Monday.

Offering an updated and more detailed estimate than its 2019 assessment of similar legislation, the nonpartisan budget agency said the wage boost would lift about 900,000 workers out of poverty but make another 1.4 million workers jobless. And about 27 million workers overall would get a pay boost.

As someone with two school aged children still working food service / retail type jobs, I can assure you that raising the minimum wage in most of these cases will simply push these employers to cut corners, cut hours, and ultimately cut employees. While it might be nice for some of these employees to earn the same amount of money to work less hours, it's unlikely that the bulk of them will see more money.

As someone who managed retail for years, I can tell you that the payroll budget is going to be tracking your monetary cost, not the number of hours worked. You are provided a payroll budget of X amount of dollars, not a payroll budget of X amount of hours. If you have to give everyone a raise, it will only cause you to schedule out people for less hours or to let people go in order to provide the same amount of hours to your core employees.

So the CBO might be giving a reasonable assessment based on the pure numbers. But with well over 30 million people living in poverty, something that only improves that number marginally while costing jobs might not make the most economic sense.  An economic plan that looks to naturally expand our economy and make businesses more profitable (so they can afford to increase pay and keep hours) would seem to make more sense. But that requires certain political concessions that many are not willing to make.