Ah, The corporate bag of rhetorical nonsense. The gift that keeps giving. As in, we get to starve people by impoverishing them when they work for us because actually we’re such good people — we give jobs to teenagers. You’ve probably heard of that argument by the fast-food industry…hey, you may have gotten that loud of bullshit yourself when you had one of those jobs. But, it is bullshit.

A lot has been in the air about fast-food workers striking and demanding a raise to a living wage — though even the demand of $15 an hour isn’t enough, in my humble opinion. But, hell, it’s a lot better than the pathetic, immoral $7.25 federal minimum wage.

My friends over at the Center for Economic and Policy Research blow a big hole in the “these are just teenagers” argument:

First of all, only about 30 percent of fast-food workers are teenagers. Another 30 percent are between the ages of 20 and 24. The remaining 40 percent are 25 and older. (All the data we present here are from the government’s Current Population Survey, where we have combined data for the years 2010 through 2012 in order to provide a large enough sample for analysis.) Half of fast-food workers are 23 or older. Many teenagers do work in fast-food, but the majority of fast-food workers are not teenagers. [emphasis added]