Raising the minimum wage kills jobs. For four decades, trickle-downers on the right and the left repeated the claim that raising wages for workers kills jobs – despite the fact that evidence collected as far back as David Card and Alan Krueger’s seminal 1994 minimum wage study showed no indication that increasing the wage decreases employment. Card won the Nobel Prize for his work debunking those claims, but holdouts like Sen. Joe Manchin still repeat the classic trickle-down argument that raising the wage kills business as an excuse for rejecting a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15.

Cutting taxes makes people work harder. In the 1990s, economist Martin Feldstein claimed that because the wealthy make more money when taxes are lower, that means lower taxes incentivize people to work harder. This is circular logic, however: Instead of looking at income to determine whether people work more when taxes are lower, economists should look at work hours or employment levels – and when you study that, there’s absolutely no evidence for this theory. Still, you’ll hear trickle-downers spout it off to justify cutting taxes on the wealthy.

Regulation hurts businesses. This is a common myth that you’ll hear often from a wide range of companies – especially the oil and gas industry. The truth is, federal regulation can actually prevent disasters and save companies money in the long run. For example, if there had been stronger federal regulations on BP’s equipment before the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the company could have stopped the biggest oil spill in history, prevented the deaths of 11 workers, saved $70 billion, and avoided a public relations nightmare.