Do you think the minimum wage should be raised? Do you think there should be a living wage?

Question

What do you think about today's minimum wage? Should it be increased? Should there be a living wage instead of a minimum wage? What do you think?

Answer 1

YES! It definately needs to get increased!! I still have two years of college to pay for! It's been $5.15 for like, over 20 years or something. The value of a dollar inflates every year and wages should follow it. $5.15 in 1985 was WAY more than it is today. Back then you could get over half a tank of gas, now it barely buys you a combo meal at Taco Bell.

Answer 2

The minimum wage is irrelevant in the long term, but it can disrupt in the short term.

Example - the work a doctor (let's say $75/hour out of school) performs is worth roughly 14 times what the work of someone making minimum wage performs.

If I raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour, what have I changed about the relative worth of the doctor and the minimum wage worker? Nothing, of course.

The economy can only deal with this in two ways, and it will deal with it:

It can eliminate unskilled positions so that anyone making $10 an hour is worth 1/7 th of what a starting doctor is worth. In this case, of course the unskilled lose because they no longer have an option that they had before - i.e. they cannot work at all because they do not meet the minimum skill threshold.

Or, the economy can reestablish the previous ratio, and the beginning doctor wage will shift to $150/hour. In the meantime, goods and services directly affected by the minimum wage will temporarily be overpriced. Those goods and services tend to be low-end consumer products that take up a larger percentage of the spending of those at the lower end of the economic scale. The rich guy can invest his money and wait to purchase that yacht until the prices are reestablished. In fact, because the rich guy has investment options, and he knows the economic effects of a minimum wage increase, it's very likely that the rich can capitalize on minimum wage increases and actually make money right after one. (Example? Sell short on McDonald's stock because it will probably suffer an initial price decline...)

Therefore, the practical effects of a minimum wage increase are a short term wealth transfer from the poor to the rich, with a final equilibrium about where you started.

As you can see, the minimum wage is a gimmick designed by politicians to collect votes from economically illiterate poor people.

Answer 3

The basis for imposing a minimum wage is because the equilibrium wage is too low. This happens when the supply of jobs is higher than the demand for jobs.
Minimum wage will aggrevate the problem by reducing the availability of jobs.
as a result, some people will willingly work illegally accepting dirt pay.

With regards to the "living wage" some companies, while paying minimum wage to white collar workers, provide benefits, like rice allowance, gas allowance, etc etc.

Answer 4

Minimum wage puts people out of work. I'm not the first person to say this, I think I heard it first in my economics class.

Did you ever think why unions want a raise in the minimum wage? Because their contract are sometimes based on multiples of the min.

If I was free to hire people, say even disabled people, I could hire alot more of them if I could hire them for a competitive price rather than an artificial price imposed by the government.

For the record, could you tell me if you think there is a Constitutional basis for a minimum wage? Ummm.....I didn't think so either.

Answer 5

I think its a Catch 22. You raise the minimum wage then the employers have to raise their prices to pay the higher wages causing that person to still not be able to pay for things. I mean you have to raise it to adjust to the stardard living costs but you will never be able to catch up. I mean I don't make minimum wage and I'm barely scrapping by.

Answer 6

I did a college paper on this fact. Do minimum wages help or hurt? Then I discussed a living wage.

Here is the thesis for the paper I wrote:

People do not know what to think when it comes to a minimum wage. Some think it is good to have one because it guarantees that workers will receive a minimum amount of money for their labors. Economists feels that it hurts businesses because it makes them discriminate in their hiring practices.

Minimum wages hurt and help, in order to not be dependent upon the minimum earnings one must try and get an education that is a key out of this kind of poverty. The more educated one becomes the less dependent they will be on minimum wages.

Other parts of the paper:

Thomas Sowell in his book, "Basic Economics; A Citizens Guide to the Economy, defines what minimum wages are; that it would be unlawful for businesses or companies to pay wages that are less than "government-specified" labor prices. He states that it artifically raises the costs businesses are required to pay for labor and that when this happens the result would be a reduction in labor demanded, making a surplus of workers. He continues on and says, "by having a price floor on wages the effect of this result in more workers than jobs and those individuals from low-income backgrounds that are untrained become the first to be unemployed and the last ones able to find work.

The kind of jobs that pay minimum wages are typically dead end jobs that have no future; usually they are not the kind of jobs people would want to retire from. Unfortunately a lot of these positions are like merry-go-round rides found in amusement parks; they take you on a ride in a big circle and then drop you off where you got on.

The problem with a living wage is that the meaning differs from one person the the other. Define love, it means something different to every person asked to define it. The term living wage is too ambiguous, what is a living wage to one person could be the poverty level to somebody else. My economics professor James Hubert (SCCC) said, "I make $70,000 a year and to me thats not a living wage, I couldn't live on it. For others that amount of money would be a blessing.

By forcing companies to pay a living wage Hubert used the term "Quid Pro Quo" it is Latin for give and take, or tit for tat. Translated it means that there is no free lunch. Companies forced to pay a living wage would charge more for their goods and services and the consumer would pay for the forced costs they are mandated to pay their workers.

I end my twenty page paper by stating:

Minimum wages is a problem that needs intervention by both government and businesses. Tax incentives could be given to companies that would hire and train applicants that cannot compete in getting a job that pays the minim wage. Minimum wage laws could be relaxed for the first 3-6 months to train workers that have little or no skills to become employable.

Education is the key to solving minimum wage problems, the more educated our nation becomes the less its people will have to depend upon minimum wages to support themselves and their families. Promoting education is the only way to economic freedome.

Answer 7

No. There should only be a market wage - what the employer is willing to pay and what the employee is willing to accept. Forcing employers to pay higher wages (by enacting non-market wages laws) leads to investment in labor-saving technology by employers which, in turn, leads to fewer jobs and higher enemployment. The result would be fewer people with higher pay and more people enemployed. Then, enemployment taxes would rise to pay for all the unemployment benefits and the cycle would start all over again.

Answer 8

It's going to be more than $7 in a few months. I think that's plenty. And a living wage? For what?

Answer 9

O yes definately! Needs to be raised since everything else is being inflated. I mean how can anyone live off of this type of pay?

Answer 10

I think there should be a maximum wage.