Raising The Minimum Wage

Raise the minimum wage: In the United States, studies show that women tend to make up a disproportionate share of low-wage workers. In the field of education, men tends to go more to STEM than women and that also leads to high paying jobs for men. If we raise the minimum wage, this will help hardworking women to support their families. Approximately, women made up two-thirds of all minimum-wage workers in 2012. With the current federal minimum wage i.e. $7.25 per hour, someone working full time, only earn $15,080 a year round. People working full time with minimum wage is still below the poverty threshold for any family with children and single person is also not far above the poverty line. So, increasing the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would help increase the wages for about 15 million women, which will help close the gender wage gap.

On June 16, 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced a plan to help raise the United States out of the Great Depression. At the heart of this plan was the idea that wages must be set and fair. “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”(Roosevelt) This plan became the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set the Federal Minimum wage. Minimum wage has increased, slowly, over the years, but has not kept up with its intended purpose. Raising the federal minimum wage to a "fair living wage" level will improve the lives of the working poor, without adverse economic consequences.

There is a lot of controversy over whether the minimum wage should be increased to 15$ an hour in all states. Proponents say that current wages in America are not livable because inflation is way higher than the current minimum wage; Minimum wage was 1.60 in 1968, which is equal to 11.60 today. Opponents say that many cannot afford this, will have to close down, make cuts, raise prices and lay off people because they will need to pay them more. Most economists believe that that high of an increase would hurt job growth. I believe that Increasing the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour nationwide will do more harm than good. Raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour nationwide is too big of a jump and would just cause businesses to cut off workers, force small businesses to close and increase inflation.

By raising the minimum wage some people will no longer live below the poverty line, the amount of consumer spending will increase and more people will be in better health.

The federal minimum wage in the United States is currently $7.25 an hour. Increasing the minimum wage would lift approximately 900,000 people out of poverty. Forty-three million Americans are living in poverty due to low income, health care costs, childcare costs, college costs, and housing costs. The federal minimum wage should be raised because it keeps up with inflation and would scale down poverty levels.

With the minimum wage set at $7.25 dollars per hour many people are struggling to make do. The average cost of living in America is too much for people, who make minimum wage, to make ends meet. It’s thought that raising the minimum wage will have a negative effect on the unemployment rate but there has been no evidence of that. The value of the minimum wage has dropped immensely since 1960. Raising the minimum wage will be beneficial to America and its citizens. In 1968 the minimum wage was equal to $10.74 today. That means in 50 years the purchasing power of the minimum wage has diminished. From the end of WWII upto 1968 minimum wage was on pace with the average worker productivity rate. If this trend was true from 1968 to today and worker

Others studies also report that women are impacted more than men. Two thirds of all workers being paid at or below the federal minimum wage are women. This has been continued in a lot of companies, where there still give more rights to men than women for the same position. This means that 67% more women work minimum wage jobs than men. So, this will really affect women because they will be still doing the same amount of work or more work than before and getting paid less than men.

In addition to raising wages and establishing safer working conditions, enforcing unionization nationwide can also can also create better benefits for the working population. Unions have played a major role in regulating overtime pay and minimum wage. Recently, activists and labor unions have been fighting for minimum wage to rise to 15 dollars. Raising minimum wage would lower the poverty rate in the United States. In a study conducted in 2013 by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, “economist Arindrajit Dube, PhD, estimated that increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 is ‘projected to reduce the number of non-elderly living in poverty by around 4.6 million’” (Should). Under the Social Security Act of 1935, unemployment insurance (UI)

Study shows that wage increases do lower poverty, by 2.4% if wage at $8.00, consistent with other studies. (Washington Post/ Arin Dube)

The economic effects of raising the minimum wage can be damaging, but I believe the benefits of it outweigh the negatives. Those who tend to live on the minimum wage - fast food workers, retail employees, ext. - tend to spend most to all of their income. By raising their wage, they are able to 1. spend more and 2. possibly invest more. This would have a ripple effect throughout the entire economy - leading to raises for everyone. It is

The employment effect of the minimum wage is one of the most studied topics in all economics. Today, the debate over raising the minimum wage has been a hot topic after President Obama explained in his 2014 State of the Union address that he intends to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour, an increase of over 40 percent. While the President and his supporters claim that this increase would greatly benefit the economy and result in growing the businesses. Unlike some suggest that creating more jobs for people who need them rather than raising earnings for people who already have them is a better solution for reducing the national poverty rate. Minimum wages are on the agenda in many parts of the world (Luce 2). For example, countries like Australia and Mexico have minimum wage legislation, so they have Fair Work Commission that sets an hourly minimum wage by industry every year. In United States, the minimum wage now is $7.25 an hour, but cities and counties in California, Illinois, Maryland, New Mexico, and Washington set their own wage that helped grow the businesses markets. Therefore, the three main reasons why increasing the minimum wage will help the businesses are; have more opportunity for new jobs, reduce expense for social programs, and decrease turnover rate.

Raising the minimum wage would boost the economy. A person receiving minimum wage ($7.25) can only afford to live in penury. However, a better economics, good policy, and good workers can result from increasing the wage. It can reduce the lack of balance in income without the unemployment rates rising. This could also lead to an increase in customers spending more money; which would contribute to GDP growth. According to Aaronson and French (2013), “$1.75 hike in the hourly federal minimum wage could increase the level of real gross domestic product (GDP) by up to 0.3 percentage points in the near term, but with virtually no effect in the long term.” Based on the gross domestic product, our minimum wage should at least be $12 an hour. A few studies have shown that accumulating the wage while the unemployment rates are high would not have a negative effect on job growth. Certain states that raised their minimum wage had job growth that was almost above the national average.

American teenagers rejoice in happiness for the ability to buy whatever they want with a minimum wage increase… is what is to be expected with the increase of the federal minimum wage minimum wage, but while everyone loves being able to buy that new video game on release, how does this put everyone, including the teen, at an economical disadvantage? Low wage citizens and those who live in poverty might argue that raising the federal minimum wage of $7.25 would make their lives easier to economically maintain due to the raise of money gained, but that is simply not true. Therefore, so that inflation/higher production costs doesn’t devastate the national economy of the United States, the minimum wage should not be raised any higher than what it is currently placed at.

The minimum wage has grown twenty two times since it was first introduced in 1938.

Many people believe that the federal minimum wage is not high enough to support a family. Since the establishment of the federal minimum wage in 1938, it has risen over 22 times by congressional approval. The minimum wage started as $0.25 and is currently $7.25. While this is the federal minimum wage, some states such as California have raised theirs as high as $10.00 an hour. It is important that the minimum wage be raised to help people keep up with the rising cost of living in the United States. No one can support a family on $7.25 per hour (ProCon.org 2016).