How many people have spent countless days and nights working around the clock just to get food on the table or get the bills paid? If one was to go deep in thought about this question, the answer would be too many. Millions of men, women, elders, veterans, teenagers, etc. are working multiple jobs because the wage they are being paid is too low to allow them to live without worry. The on-going proposal of the United States federal minimum wage has been undecided for too long. In 2014, president at the time, Barack Obama proposed the federal minimum wage of $10.10. This means in every state, the lowest an employee can make each hour is ten dollars and ten cents. It is now 2019 and the minimum wage has still been untouched since the year 1991; this was 28 years ago. Although it has been several years since the last proposal of a rising federal wage, a new one has been announced and there are many strong opinions towards this proposition. A great number of Americans view that $15 is too high of a minimum wage while other claim it is still too low.
Fifteen dollars an hour can certainly better the life of a single adult but a family with several children, this wage could possibly help them. With this high of a minimum wage, there are multiple problems that could be run into that include the economy and small businesses. Although the minimum wage is just a starting wage, if $15 is too high, unskilled workers or first time workers could be denied a job because they are not worth the money or the owners do not have enough money to pay these employees. President Trump is capable of creating new jobs in the United States and to have a rising minimum wage survive within the new and existing companies. Mom and Pop shops could be in boiling waters if the minimum wage rises too high. It would be beneficial to the United States, small businesses, and new companies to have a minimum wage that is feasible instead of one that could leave businesses combing for pennies to pay their workers with. Here is a possible case-scenerio complication: the federal minimum wage rises, businesses can’t afford to pay their employees which causes them to raise their prices, now people can no longer afford these services because wages do not permit them. This circumstance has the potential to go in circles until a manageable wage is set for workers and business owners.
Another negative effect raising the federal minimum wage to $15 could have is replacing human workers with machines. This would help the company grow because there would only be a single payment in order to buy the machine rather than to pay an employee weekly or bi-weekly for the same kind of work the machine is doing. Companies like Stop & Shop and other “grocery stores might substitute cashiers to self-checkout systems or higher-skilled labor workers. Minimum wage being increased may result in low-skilled workers losing their jobs or having less hours which means their paycheck will be lower and the workers could end up near the poverty line,” says Labor Economist Joseph Sabia. Supporting this, two more American Economists, David Neumark and William Wascher, conducted research and found that, “some poor workers that held their jobs during and after wage increases were lifted out of poverty, while others lost jobs and fell into poverty.” It is easy to see that increasing the minimum wage could have very different outcomes; the federal minimum wage needs to rise at a slow rate so the United States economy does not run into major problems.
Recently, in the State of the Union Address, President Trump announced that the federal minimum wage should be increased and millions of workers couldn’t agree more. Instead of potentially harming the US and/or state economy, the federal minimum wage should slowly be increased so economic researchers can collect data around the country; this data can show if businesses are being harmed or prospering. American economist, Milton Friedman, states, “one of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results,” this can be taken to say, a mistake could be made by looking at what supposed to happen in the long run, rather than what is actually happening. An “abrupt high minimum wage can result in economic consequences” that could end in businesses leaving the United States, suggests Richard Florida who studies in social and economical theories. Richard Florida supports the idea that the federal minimum wage should be slowly raised in order to keep a strong economy and flourishing businesses within the United States.
In a study done in 2017, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that, “gradually raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2024 would lift pay for 41 million workers or about 30 percent of the U.S. workforce.”
