Last Friday, Service Employees International Union chapter President David Rolf came to Washington D.C. to promote his new book, “The Fight for $15.” Predictably, the book makes the claim that more than doubling the federal minimum wage will be all gain and no pain, lifting millions of people out of poverty without costing jobs. To top it off, he claims it would also be a massive boon to the economy.

The book is Exhibit A in the library of junk economics. Like junk science, junk economics turns basic principles on their heads, purposefully confusing and muddying logic in order to achieve a politicized goal.

The claim that minimum wages don’t reduce job opportunities is perhaps the paragon of junk economics. Rather than admitting the rigid economic law that price increases reduce demand (in this case, a price increase of labor reduces the demand for labor), junk economics confuses the issue with mystifying claims about minimum wage’s “stimulative effects.”

Last December, the Federal Reserve Board of San Francisco released a report concluding that recent minimum wage increases have cost 100,000 to 200,000 jobs nationally. And a new Institute for the Study of Labor paper finds a “consistently negative and statistically significant effect of minimum wages on teenage employment” over the last 60 years.

Proponents’ claim that wage hikes significantly reduce poverty is also junk economics. Putting aside the job loss factor for a moment, the simple fact is that a large majority of poor people don’t work at all and, therefore, aren’t helped by minimum wage increases.

But the basic logic that you must be employed to be affected by a wage hike doesn’t stop activists from claiming that “millions” of people will be “lifted out” of poverty because of them.