Should The Minimum Wage Be Increased

How has minimum wage affected the economy of the United States since its creation? Would raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour help our economy? The total U.S. labor force was roughly 158.7 million. About 47%, or 75.3 million workers, were paid an hourly wage. Of all hourly workers about 4.7%, or 3.54 million, earned a wage equal to or below the minimum wage. If you multiply the number of workers who earned the minimum wage by the current minimum wage, you’d get the total wages earned by this group (3.54 million X $7.25 = $26.1 million). If every one of these workers received an increase to $15 per hour, the total wage earned by this group would be $54.0 million. This represents an increase of $27.9 million. If 100% of this income was spent

This increase, even if completely spent (which is doubtful), would not be very significant. Therefore, in my view, the economic benefit “argument” is a red herring. What should a worker be paid? But what happens when minimum wage is raised? The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a new report on the impacts of raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour and $9 an hour. It found that a $10.10 minimum wage, implemented by 2016, would mean higher earnings for 16.5 million workers, resulting in $31 billion more in higher earnings. It would also lift nearly 1 million people out of poverty. But it also found that an increase would reduce jobs slightly. “Once fully implemented in the second half of 2016, the $10.10 option would reduce total employment by about 500,000 workers, or 0.3 percent,” it projects. That figure takes into account what it says would be a decrease in jobs for low-wage workers as well as an increase of “a few tens of thousands of jobs” for others thanks to higher demand. “Once the increases and decreases in income for all workers are taken into account, overall real income would rise by $2 billion,” it says. The vast majority of people impacted, over 95 percent, will be impacted