Minimum Wage: Should We Raise It?

Individuals all across America work in fast food restaurants, retail stores, and car washes for a ridiculously small amount of money. They spend endless hours at their job and when they receive their paycheck, there is hardly enough money to go out to dinner and a movie. Why? This is because the minimum wage is currently sweeping across the country and endangering American families. Minimum wage workers should be able to support themselves and their families in our country, but at the present minimum wage, this is very hard to be accomplished. Minimum wage is the minimum hourly, daily or monthly wage which must be paid to employees or workers. Each country sets its own minimum wage laws and regulations. Increasing the minimum wage can improve the economy, help with the drastic increase in the cost of living, and can have positive effects on businesses.

The minimum wage was first enacted in 1938, as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act. At first, minimum wage was just 25 cents per hour, but it has been raised several times ever since.. Efforts to increase the minimum wage are generally supported by liberal anti-poverty organizations and unions, who believe it will help the nation's working poor. A full time minimum wage worker makes just $10,712 per year, well below the poverty line to support a family. Supporters to increase minimum wage say that most of those affected by a minimum wage increase are adults aged 20 and over. Opponents to minimum wage include conservative organizations and businesses, especially small businesses and retailers, who argue that increasing the minimum wage will simply increase unemployment. Others argue that every ten percent increase in the minimum wage results in a loss of 100,000 jobs. Opponents dispute that many minimum wage workers are teenagers with few skills who need these jobs to break into the work force, and who are not the primary bread winners in their households.

Increased personal income undoubtedly promotes commerce and stimulates economies everywhere. By protecting and stabilizing the employees themselves we can equally protect and stabilize businesses everywhere. According to statistical surveys, minimum wage workers spend almost 100% of past wage increases right back into the economy. Therefore, this creates swift economic growth and job creation. There has been recently established a campaign called the Universal Living Wage. It is based on the premise that if a person works 40 hours a week, he/she should be able to afford basic housing. The proposal, through a ten year plan, is to fix the Federal Minimum Wage by indexing it to the local cost of housing all over the United States. By using present government guidelines: work 40 hours in a week, spend no more than 30% of one's income on housing, and using the HUD section 8 rental calculations, will make certain that anyone working 40 hours in a week will be able to afford basic rental housing, clothing, utilities, food, and access to health care. Establishing a "living" wage similarly stimulates the overall demand for goods and services in the economy. Families will become very more credit worthy consequently being able to reward themselves of more goods and more services. And the overall demand for goods and services will increase demand for low wage workers as industry responds to this demand and stimulation. A minimum wage increase will not hurt the economy. History unmistakably shows that raising the minimum wage has not had any negative impact on employment, jobs, or inflation. In the four years after the last minimum wage increase passed, the economy had its strongest growth in over three decades. Almost 12 million new jobs were added; 248,000 per month. Raising the minimum wage will benefit the economy as a whole.

The cost of living has gotten extremely high, and is causing many people to live in poverty. According to a woman named Keisha Walker, "They need to raise it if only to help people pay for rising rent. It's getting so you can't survive in this country." When adjusted for rising living costs, those earning minimum wage makes less per hour today than they have in the past 51 years. The typical minimum wage worker is not a teenager earning side money. We find that minimum wage workers are usually over 20 years old and are trying to support a family. Most minimum-wage workers are adults. Of the 9.5 million workers with wages below $6.15, 68 percent are adults and 35 percent help support a family. There is no way that one person can support an entire family based on the very low wages that they receive. Inflation has caused my prices to go up and is in turn hurting Americans by making it more difficult to pay for everyday items. The daily increase in the price of gasoline in America is finally taking its toll on the public. Gasoline products affect every aspect of everyday life. Domestic electricity costs were up 25.9% in the past year, and gas bills rose even more sharply; the annual pace of 37.1% is the steepest since 1963. Food prices ticked up sharply in July. Increasing the minimum wage would help families pay for groceries and rent. Raising the minimum wage just $1.00 would raise the annual earnings of a full-time worker by about $2,000 a year. For a full-time worker supporting a family of four, a $1.00 minimum wage increase would translate into enough money to pay for nearly eight months of groceries or five months of rent.

Raising the minimum wage would have little real impact on large retail chains or their employees, claims Wharton faculty. A proposal passed by Chicago's City Council in July, is saying that retail chains with sales of more than $1 billion or stores larger than 90,000 square feet will be required to pay workers $10 an hour, while the federal minimum wage remains at $5.15 an hour. Living wage requirements would have little impact on big-box retailers because the bulk of their business costs lie in inventory, not labor. Numerous economic studies, including those by David Card and Alan Krueger of Princeton University, have shown that increasing the minimum wage has no negative effect on employment. Recent research has even showed that higher wages can increase employment, because such higher wages increase employers' ability to attract, keep and motivate workers. Increasing the minimum wage can be very rewarding to businesses. When workers make more money, they also have more money to spend. In fact, minimum wage workers have spent almost 100% of past wage increases directly into the economy.

The minimum wage is currently $5.15 an hour. Senator Edward Kennedy and Representative George Miller have co-authored a bill to increase it to $7.25 over three years that has bipartisan support in Congress and overwhelming support across the country. But the Republican leadership is doing everything in its power to keep this plan from becoming law by blocking it from coming to the floor in the House and attaching poison pills to it in the Senate.

"I find it outrageous that a week after the House declined to block a cost of living increase for Members of Congress the Republican Leadership would try to prevent members from increasing the minimum wage so folks can have a decent standard of living," said Dave Obey, Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee. "Democrats are going to keep trying to attach a minimum wage increase to bills until we get a vote on the House Floor." The democrats believe that this issue resonates strongly with fariness. It is not fair that hard working men and women can't afford to put food on the table and support their families. They believe it is wrong to give billions of dollars in tax relief to the wealthy and then turn you back on hard working families who live in Increasing the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour would benefit 6.5 million Americans. An increase to $7.25 an hour will mean an extra $4,000 a year for millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet." The Fair Minimum Wage Act will provide a long-overdue increase in the federal minimum wage. The bill would raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour in three steps: $5.85 60 days after enactment; $6.55 one year later; $7.25 one year after that. Another method could be The Raise the Minimum Wage for Working Arizonans Act. I believe this method should not be just for Arizonans, but should also be changed to work for all Americans. This law increases the minimum wage to $6.75 an hour for working Arizonans starting in 2007. The plan applies the Arizona minimum wage law statewide. The state minimum wage would be increased each January 1 for changes in the cost of living. The new state minimum wage law would apply to all employers except: a person who is employed performing babysitting services in the employer's home on a casual basis, any person who is employed by a parent or a sibling, the United States government, employees who regularly receive tips and who are otherwise exempt under federal minimum wage law, the State of Arizona government, but political subdivisions of this state would have to comply with the state minimum wage law, or a business that has less than $500,000 in gross annual revenue and that is exempt from having to pay a minimum wage under federal law. I also believe that the Universal Living Wage campaign could be a good method to increasing the mimimum wage. It will still mean workers will work 40 hours a week but will have enough money to spend on housing and other things they need so they will never live in poverty.

I believe that the Fair Minimum Wage Act would be the most effective method in carrying out the task of raising minimum wage. It doesn't increase the minimum wage right away, but it does it gradually in 3 steps. I believe that this method will keep up with inflation and be adjustable to keep up with the cost of living. I think $7.25 is just the right amount to make a substantial living off of. It won't be too little so that you can't afford housing, but it won't be too much so that minimum wage workers will be able to be spending crazy amounts of money.