Minimum Wage For Teens May Go Up
Yesterday, i heard a story on our local TV station that minimum wage may go up. After i heard that, i thought to myself WTH is wrong with people with the whole minimum wage thing. If this is your first time on this site, read this first, then come back and read this post. It will make more sense if you do. The following are comments that agree with me that raising the minimum wage is not good for the economy.
If the government wants to help the poor this isnt working because over 90% of the population earning minimum wage are teenagers coming from middle income houses not head of household people. When minimum wage gos up so dose unemployment prices go up benefits go down and on the job training go’s down which could be very useful to teenagers.
Minimum is not a living wage today either. Read about the history of it, it was never intended to be a living wage. A company does not have to provide anybody with a livable wage if they dont want to. A wage is a binding agreement between a company and an employee. If the employee feels he is not getting paid what he is worth, he can ask for a raise, and the comapny has the right to either approve of the increase or deny it. If they deny it, then the employee can get out of the contract agreement and seek employment elsewhere.
Let’s say I walk into a grocery store with $6.75 today. I can probably pick up a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, and a loaf of bread with what I’ve got in my pocket. So, the buying power of one hour’s wages is a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, and a loaf of bread.When the value of the dollar goes down like it did from 1916 to today, we have inflation. In an inflation, the buying power of an hour’s wages go down. For example, if the price of bread, milk, and eggs doubles, it now takes two hours’ wages to buy them, and your buying power is cut in half. Ultimately, if you’re worried about how to pay your bills, it doesn’t matter whether you’re earning $0.16/hour in 1916 or $6.75 in 2006, your real concern is how much buying power you have. Raising the minimum wage to $100/hour does no good if the cost of a loaf of bread is $200. Even though you’d be earning wages that by today’s standards would put you in the top 2% of wage earners, your buying power would be extremely low.
So, let’s say you’re one of those slightly-above-minimum-wage working people, say earning $7.75/hour. We raise minimum wage to $8.75/hour. What do you think your new pay rate will be? Well, for most people, it will be $8.75/hour — the new minimum wage — even though to keep up with the inflation the new minimum wage causes, you’d need to be earning more like $10/hour. Raising the minimum wage puts more workers into the minimum-wage trap.
it will make the price of everything go up so minimum wage will have to go up again, many people will be fired to compensate the salaries of the people that businesses keep, unemployment will go up, people with non-minimum wage jobs but still low paying jobs will suffer (because prices will go up but their wages will not).
Minimum wage in itself is a big con for taking away from the free market. Companies should be able to pay whatever they can find people to work for and not be subjected to a minimum amount they need to pay. Of course this is all the fault of the welfare system which acts as an alternative to working minimum wage jobs. So to keep people from taking handouts that the government provides, the government has forced corporations to offer a more lucrative alternative.
That is all i have for the time being. I will probably write more about this issue since here in IL, the wage will go up again in July for the next two years. In 2010, it will be $8.25\hr for minimum wage. That is more than my first full-time job after college graduation!