Minimum Wage This has been a discussion for the ages. The debate over raising the minimum wage has been a hot topic. Raising minimum wage would reduce poverty, be better for lower paid workers, and to reduce expense for social programs.
The government spends millions of dollars supporting poor families every year. Since the government is already in an estimated $19.4 trillion debt as of 2016, raising the minimum wage would be a way to save them money and pay back some of that debt (Lantigua-Williams). By raising the minimum wage to $10.10, 1.7 million workers would no longer need governmental support to be financially stable. With this amount of people no longer needing the government's help, the government will have extra money to use. Just from the increase of minimum wage, the government would save $4.6 billion from not having to send out as many food stamps alone. And over just one year, the increase in pay would reduce the government spending on income-support programs by $7.6 billion (“Should Federal Minimum”). The government will be able to use this money on other important things that will help the country grow and
Between the year of nineteen twenty-nine and nineteen thirty-nine, The United States went through one of the worst economic downturn’s known as the Great Depression. The effects of the Great Depression caused many economic problems which sent wall street into a chaos. Ever since then Poverty has struck many middle and poor class families for years. Over time it has separated many families and caused those who are less fortunate to drain the wealthy. The minimum wage was created to keep many lives going. Although this is the case, minimum wage does not keep many people afloat, it has proven to be an issue and these wages need to be increased. Increasing minimum wage would increase economic activity, reduce poverty, and reduce government welfare spending. Fixing all of these will positively increase the economy and resolve our countries resounding debt.
The federal minimum wage should be raised for the low-income workers, because it may reduce the gap between the rich and poor in our nation, it can help bring people up from below poverty lines, and will improve the economy. The federal minimum wage has been widely talked about, and continues to be a growing issue in the United States today. Many low-income workers have come together because they want equal pay.
The real question everyone wants to know is, is the minimum wage going to increase or will it remain the same? Let 's go back in time to where it all started in 1938. President Franklin D. Roosevelt set the minimum wage to twenty-five cents an hour. FDR had a great statement about minimum wage and it 's not for little kids. The statement proposes "no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in the country" (Olsen). This is the original thought behind what we now know, today, as minimum wage. The problem is that other salaries have risen exponentially and the minimum wage has remained stagnant and has not kept up with inflation.
The Federal Government Should Increase the Minimum Wage to $15 an Hour Since 1938 the federal government for the United States of America has set the minimum wage. The laws were put in place to prevent employers from taking advantage of workers and paying a person
It seems only logical that providing the poorest segment of society with more pay for their work will improve their situation and give them the working capital they need to work their way out of poverty. With each incremental increase those who are directly affected by the increase will instantly have more money to help them purchase more good and services to improve their living conditions. Additionally increasing the minimum wage would likely have a positive effect on the overall economy as workers immediately increase their consumption possibly increasing GDP and the resulting employment
If minimum wage was to increase so would the prices Americans will be forced to pay for goods and services. Businesses do not want to lose any money that they could potentially be making. They will do anything they can to prevent a loss of income. If Congress was to increase the requirement of pay, Americans would quickly see the prices increase. A 2015 Purdue University study found that raising the wage of fast food restaurant employees to $15 or $22 per hour would result in a price increase of 4.3% and 25%. With prices increasing, people won’t be buying businesses products because they may see it as too expensive. If the people who had a raise in
An increase of the federal minimum wage would improve the lives of millions of Americans. It is a step towards lifting these people out of poverty. The federal minimum wage is supposed to enable Americans to earn a living wage, but it has not been raised in 8 years, and many people who make wages at or close to this wage are not able to survive on this pay alone. They rely on subsidies from the government and the community to provide some of the necessities they cannot provide for their families. An increase of the federal minimum wage is going to make these families more self-sustaining (CBO, February 2014).
Minimum wage has been a topic that has caused mixed feelings from all parts of the United States and other countries and it continues to be a topic of interest to many. There are some that feel minimum wage it is not high enough to survive, while others feel if minimum wage is raised, so will the cost of goods, such as food, housing and cost of living in general, resulting in no change regardless of increase. There are many families that are living off minimum wage and can barely survive on it. The majority of these families are on either on government assistance and considered in the poverty lines thus impacting the lower class American population the most, or they are single mothers raising their families on one income. The purpose of
Raising Minimum Wage The people of America are all for raising minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour but what the people do not know is that raising minimum wage is not going to help the people in poverty. Raising minimum wage is only going to hurt the people in the middle and lower class by making the cost of living go up, leaving the people with education based jobs making around the same income, and creating a bigger career mess.
The continuous demand for more cash for less work has constrained Uncle Sam to raise the lowest pay permitted by law endless times in the last half century, which brings about higher costs for whatever is left of us. Another raise in the minimum wage would, as all the others
Keaston Gamble Mr. Miller CIS 146- Microcomputer Applications Show Me the Money I have ninety-nine problems, but money could solve at least seventy-five of them. Why is that? Because I’m still young and for the most part inexperienced in the job world, therefor they pay me the minimum requirement for all the hard
The “federal minimum wage has remained the same at $7.25 an hour since 2009” (“DeSilver, Drew”). To many people, it seems like eight years is way too long to wait for the minimum wage to go up. This is the longest time for the minimum wage to increase since 1981 to 1990 where it took nine years for the wage to increase by .40 cents going from $3.35 to $3.80 (“Wage and Hour Division (WHD)”). Other than that, minimum wage increases usually took anywhere between 1 to 5 years. But to be fair, it has changed a lot since the original .25 cents back in 1938 when the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was created. The minimum wage has increased “22 separate times over the course of the last 78 years” (“UC Davis Center for Poverty Research”). Also, the “wage now covers approximately 130 million workers or 84 percent of the labor force” unlike when it was first created and only covered “20 percent of the labor force” (“UC Davis Center for Poverty Research”). The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 or FLSA not only created the minimum wage but also created other federal protections like “overtime pay for the time worked
First, the people who will benefit most from a higher minimum wage are the low and middle income families. Poverty is a huge issue in the U.S., and a higher minimum wage would decrease the amount of people living in poverty by 2.8% (about 900,000 people) (Halvorson 1). Decreasing poverty is a vast step to ameliorating the lives of Americans. Being able to live on a higher minimum wage would be exceedingly beneficial, and even crucial to people living in poverty. If the minimum wage was raised to $10.10 an hour, it is estimated that 16.5 million people would have higher incomes leaving only half a million (3%) jobless (Halverson 1). Just raising the minimum