Minimum wage hike could lift millions from poverty
By Morgan Whitaker, MSNBC
Raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour could help to lift nearly 5 million Americans out of poverty, according to a study released last week.
University of Massachusetts-Amherst economist Arindrajit Dube found that proposals to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 would reduce the number of non-elderly living in poverty by about 4.6 million in the short term, and that nearly 7 million would be lifted from poverty over the long term.
The study further finds that the poverty rate – which rose by 3.4 percent during the Great Recession, and has not significantly dropped – could be cut in half if Congress passed a $10.10 minimum wage law. He estimates that an average family in the bottom 10 percent
of earners in the United States would see an extra of $1,700 of income a year.
I recently wrote an article about how an increase in the minimum wage rate increases unemployment. You can read it here: http://wp.me/p3N9zD-4e
Robert…I took the time to read your article and was surprised(OK-not really) to find not a single fact, not a single study was referenced or cited in your opinion piece, though there was a veiled nod towards abolishing ‘federal minimum wage standards’ altogether. My question is this- Are you suggesting that the masses will quietly watch their children and parents starve while the rest of us count our money?i In an economy that increasingly offers little more than service jobs, how do we as a society ensure that everyone has a seat at the table? If our job system is changing then our wage system also must. The truth is that ‘trickle down economics’ is a failure: it has been used to ‘trickle ON’ the worker- if you get my drift.
Because housing is so expensive in California, there is an alternative poverty rating that has California with the highest poverty rate in the nation at around 25%. I will not be surprised to see some kind of evaluation stating a living wage is somewhere around $15/an hour in the city of South Lake Tahoe.
Maintaining the current wage standard is purely corporate welfare. Workers at Wal Mart, McDonalds etc likely work full time and cannot make it work. These companies then hire lobbies to suppress the minimum wage thereby shifting the responsibility to government programs like food stamps, section 8 housing etc. As a result, we taxpayers then effectively subsidize THEIR employees.
Plenty of people don’t want to work and are lazy and have made poor choices. If workers can maintain a job then the standard wage needs to be changed and the responsibility moved back to the private market to pay a wage that does not have to be subsidized by our tax dollars. Enough is enough.
Arguments that it will hurt business are humorous and offensive and a waste of my time. Level the playing field and get the corporations off our payroll.
Raising the minimum wage will also devalue my current wages. Am I to believe that I will get a raise commensurate with the raise in minimum wage? And, if so, what will this do to the cost of goods and services? Most likely it will raise them enough to make the raise in minimum wage a moot point.
We need to have entry level positions in the workplace so that students and untrained people can have a place to start. Those who keep these jobs as primary employment will often find that they are not enough to maintain a household. I don’t think that raising their wages is going to do what many think it should.
Just my 2 cents worth.
:-)
Mama Bear, If consumer prices don’t change, how does it devalue your current wages? The value of your wage is what you can buy and how much you can invest, not that you are making more than X% of the rest of the population.
Lisa, consumer prices WILL change. How can the local burger joint pay $2 more for its employees (and a corresponding percentage for their social security/medicare/unemployment payments) and not charge us more the burgers? It’ll happen.
Dog, you are right.
I hire 15 to 20 people each summer. They need to be physically fit and pass a drug screen. Meeting those two qualifications is worth $12.50 per hour. That is the least I can pay and attract employees. I have a couple felons even.
If people are supporting a family on minimum wage it means that the person is having a family without investing even a minimum amount of time on their education. I am not talking college, I mean some technical education like a trade, office management, bookkeeping…something. The problem isn’t the minimum wage rate, the problem is a lack of education. The No Child Left Behind Act ruined technical education in schools and assumed everyone should go to college. Nothing could be further from the truth. Half the population has an IQ of less than 100, they are not college bound. They need skills training. We don’t offer that anymore. That is the problem.
Moral, I think your post is an excellent counterpoint. In Europe, after high school there are 2 ways to go, university or trade school. Some of that is needed here.
In Europe each college class has as many A’s as F’s. A 3.0 means something. I hope I did better, but once I got into grad school all I had to do was show up and I would have passed. American colleges really only require that you show up.
But we are talking real expensive stuff when we start looking at the real problem of families living on a minimum wage.
My wife got her Masters Degree a few years back-anybody that actually went to graduate school at a legit college or university will tell you that unless you have someone doing all the research-writing all the papers- meeting all the deadlines and taking all the tests-and paying for it all-it takes a little bit more than just showing up-that is bs
TeaTotal, how many people in your wife’s grad school class got an F? What was the typical grade distribution?
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2013/12/26/why-college-grade-inflation-is-a-real-problem-and-how-to-fix-it
My wife admitted that some people in her program seemed to get A’s and B’s for somewhat less work than she did and there are problems with grades-but she said that nobody passed that didn’t do the work and just showed up-thats simply untrue-she also said that the report you cited was from someone at AEI http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/american-enterprise-institute -well known for their goals to privatize all education from cradle to grave-so consider the source to be wild exaggeration with a profit driven agenda only