Why would any one be against raising the minimum wage?

Question

Several states are considering a hike in the minimum wage this year. Why would you vote against it.

Answer 1

You can not force a value of anything and expect the economy to work. When the minimum wage is raised, the price of everything on which a low-income family depends is raised - groceries, gasoline, clothing, etc.

Think about it. Who makes minimum wage? The people who work at the grocery store, the gas station, discount stores, McDonalds, etc. Do you think the company can just magically pay more money to its employees? No, they must raise prices. Raising the minimum wage hurts the poor the most.

Anyone with a work ethic can make more than the minimum wage. You may have to start there, but if you prove yourself to be a valuable employee, you will make more. However, if the employer must pay everyone $10/hour, there is no room to reward you for working harder, is there?

It promotes people doing the least that they can do and keep their job. There is no reward in working hard if the slacker next to you is making the same.

Think of it this way: Why not raise the minimum wage to $50,000/year? Why not let everyone enjoy a middle-class lifestyle? If it doesn't work on that scale, then it can't work on a smaller scale.

.

Answer 2

Yes, I am against raising the minimum wage. Bolstering the hourly rate does not help a person that is trying to raise a family on minimum wage. It actually hurts them. If you're making $5.25 an hour and milk is $2.75 a gallon and gasoline is $2.99 a gallon then you're going to struggle to meet the prices in the market. But, if you raise the minimum wage to $7.00 an hour then you increase the price of milk so that dairies don't absorb the cost increase. And the price of gasoline goes up so that refineries don't absorb the cost of minimum wage increases. Now instead of struggling to make it work, you're just flat not going to make it work. And you put a strain on the rest of the economic population. Better education, creating new jobs and affordable childcare will do more to help the minimum wage workers than disrupting the balance and causing them to have to work harder for what will eventually be less. And also, I don't see the reason I should have to pay extra for a Big Mac because a pimple faced teen living with mommy and daddy has to be paid an extra $1.75 an hour for flipping the patties.

Answer 3

I am not against raising the minimum wage. This obviously is an emotional issue for people. People think that they can hike someone's wage and they will be better off financially. That is true to a point, but in general prices will rise because the businesses will have to raise their prices to offset the costs to still make the same profit levels as before.

If someone wants to improve their quality of life, they need to further their education and not be a high school drop out.

Answer 4

The only reason why there is a need for a minimum wage is because of illegal immigration.

Illegal immigration keeps the pay of legal, unskilled workers low, i.e., jobs that do not require higher education or vocational training.

If there were no illegal workers, employers would be forced to pay unskilled, minimum wage workers more money, since there would not be enough people to work these jobs. The demand for these workers would increase their value and hence their wages.

It is a fundamental law of supply and demand. When you have an inexhaustible supply of laborers that you can pay less than minimum wage since they are illegal workers, then companies have no need to pay legal workers a higher wage than what is mandated by law!

You are focusing on the wrong end of the equation.

Answer 5

I would ask how could anyone be for raising the minimum wage? You see, by raising the minimum wage, no one is helped. The market will simply find a new equilibrium with the new price controls. The artificial increase in wages cause prices to increase across the board. Hence, inflation. This inflation eats away at the wealth of people who have money, the lenders, etc. Eventually the poor are exactly where they were before.

Answer 6

There are two types of unemployment - frictional (due to the time it takes to find jobs) and structural (due to minimum wages and other price floors). Structural unemployment is the unemployment that is often due to wage rigidity. Wage rigidity occurs when you have a price (wage) floor that is set above the natural equilibrium for that commodity (workers). Since it is set above that point, firms will not hire until they reach equilibrium because the benefits to them are not great enough. So, the larger the gap between the equilibrium and the price floor, the larger the unemployment. Raising the minimum wage would increase that gap.

Also, it is theorized that a rise in the minimum wage would mainly help teenagers from middle-class families since most adults make somewhat higher than that wage (not all, of course). The teenagers really don't need this extra money and it would cause higher teenage unemployment because firms don't want to pay more for unexperienced labor. It is debated, though, how much the minimum wage would trickle up to help workers that make above that wage.

So goes the theory at least...

Answer 7

I am far from being an expert on economics, but it seems that it would throw off the economy. If they raised minimum wage, then ALL income would have to be adjusted accordingly, it seems. If a kid working at an unskilled job, say at McDonald's is making $10.00/hr., then a semi-skilled and skilled person would have to make much more. Seems like it would make prices go up on everything, thus making the increase in minimum wage moot.

Answer 8

The fact that 40% of people who live below the poverty line have full time jobs, seems like that in and of itself would be enough to raise minimum wage.

People are often "forced" to work for wages far below their education or age group. For example, displaced workers, employees who lost their job due to company down-sizing, absent parents, whether through divorce or death, employees returning to the work place after a long period of absence, such as an extended illness, or time off to raise a family, older workers, younger workers, etc. The list is long.

People often want to blame the person in the bad situation. If someone doesn't have a job. They tell them to get a job. If they do have a job but it pays substandard wages they tell them to get a better job.

If companies could be trusted to pay fairly there never would have been a minimum wage requirement.

And there is dignity in all work as long as it is well paid.

Peace.

Answer 9

One issue I actually take the conservative POV.

Raising the minimum wage is the 10 word answer to a 10 page problem.

Who pays for that?
Small businesses will fold if they are force to pay workers more they will have to raise prices for products and they will lose business to companies that use overseas labor.

Workers who are making minimum wage will be out of jobs making no wage.

More and More jobs will be shipped over seas where labor is only a couple of cents a day.

It is a complex problem and people say "raise the minimum wage" like that is some magic answer to all our problems.

Answer 10

Because the whole reason for one is to give you a start, not a career. Also, if you raise the wage, the people having to pay it will raise the prices they charge, has already happened in many places here in Arkansas. Thus Other pay more , ask for raise, their boss charges more for goods and services and we end up with everything equaled out but the minimum wage earner is no better off.