A quick addendum to our earlier primer on the minimum wage debate in the Land of Lincoln:

In the section where we tried to assess whether or not Illinois' current minimum wage was overly-generous, we cited figures from the Campaign for America's Future that showed today's federal minimum wage would be $8.60-per-hour (rather than $7.25) if it had been linked to inflation in 1968. It turns out that the think tank used a conservative inflation indicator to make that estimate. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator, the 1968 federal minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has the same buying power as $10.03 in today's dollars. For those counting, $10.03 is almost $2-per-hour higher than Illinois' new rate of $8.25.