Should Congress Increase the Federal Minimum Wage and Index It to Inflation...: Points of View Reference Center Home

The minimum-wage debate - bad idea President Obama, left, delivers the State of the Union address to a joint… (Charles Dharapak / Bloomberg ) In announcing his wrongheaded proposal to increase the minimum wage to $9 an hour, President Obama spoke in lofty terms: "In the wealthiest nation on Earth," he said in his State of the Union address last month, "no one who works full time should have to live in poverty." If the debate proceeds as it has -- many times -- in the past, then most Democrats will embrace the president's message and back the proposal, while most Republicans will oppose it, on the grounds that higher labor costs will lead to higher unemployment. For The Record Los Angeles Times Tuesday, March 12, 2013 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 11 Editorial Desk 0 inches; 18 words Type of Material: Correction Minimum wage: In a March 10 Op-Ed article, coauthor Kevin A. Hassett's surname was misspelled in the byline. But we shouldn't rely on political opinions in this debate. Why?

Minimum wage hike good for economy, taxpayers Through a translator, Bernardo Chimoro, of Central Falls, tells Kate Brewster, of the Economic Progress Institute, and congressmen David Cicilline and Jim Langevin why raising the minimum wage would help him and others in his community. (Photo by Bob Plain) If corporate America was still run by businessmen like Henry Ford, we probably wouldn’t need to have a minimum wage law. Ford, said Congressman Jim Langevin recently, “wanted his workers to earn a wage that was sufficient for them to buy an automobile that he produced. He recognized with a strong middle class, with a strong working class, that the economy does better, and his company did better.” Of course, somewhere along the way the business ethic of Henry Ford was subverted by that of the Koch brothers – making a meaningful minimum wage more important than ever to the American economy. “Raising the minimum wage is trickle down economics that actually works,” Langevin said. Share

Why We Should Raise the Minimum Wage | Raise The Minimum Wage With the worst recession in a generation still being felt across the nation, state and federal leaders are focused on getting their economies moving again while helping working families make ends meet. Raising the minimum wage is a key strategy for doing both and should be part of an economic recovery agenda. This briefing paper details the positive impact of raising the minimum wage – and indexing it to inflation so that it does not continue to fall in real value every year – on working families, local businesses and state economies. By boosting pay in the low-wage jobs on which more families are relying than ever, a stronger minimum wage will help restore the consumer spending that powers our economy and that local businesses need in order to grow. A robust minimum wage is a key building block of sustainable economic recovery. For more information, please download our January 2011 Briefing Paper.

Congress passes the buck, so localities bump up the minimum wage State and local governments haven't always used their role as the "laboratories of democracy" wisely or for the general good. (The phrase reaches us indirectly from the great progressive Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.) But the expanding movement to increase state and local minimum wages is an encouraging sign of wisdom in the grass roots. The most recent example comes from the small Washington city of SeaTac, which as you might surmise is the location of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The residents of this working-class community voted last month to set a minimum wage of $15 an hour for airport and hotel workers within its borders. The measure, which passed by a razor thin margin, is still ...

Does the minimum wage hurt the poor? UPDATE: In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama proposed raising the minimum wage to $9 an hour. The very next day, House Speaker John Boehner said Republicans in the House wouldn't support that proposal because it would hurt small business and kill jobs. Recently, Congressional Democrats introduced a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.80 over the next two years. It's not expected to make much headway this year, but it’s got people talking about the pros and cons of the idea. To get to the heart of this debate, I took two economists to the heart of minimum-wage country to have them hash it out. To get to there I didn't have to go far. YUM! It’s U.S. workforce is more than 800,000 strong -- and includes Liz, according to her nametag. What she didn't tell me is this fact of the modern American service economy: at current mimum-wage levels, if Liz was supporting a family of three, she’d be below the poverty line. Pollin ordered a burrito.

D.C. Council backs $11.50 minimum wage The D.C. Council must hold a final vote on the rate-increase measure and send it to Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), probably early next year. But with all 13 council members pledging their support, the final vote appeared to be a formality and likely wide enough to override a veto by Gray, who repeated Tuesday that he would prefer a smaller increase — to $10 an hour. After Gray announced Monday that he would seek a second term, the high-profile minimum-wage vote set the stage for a day of intense political theater in and around the council chambers on Pennsylvania Avenue. The votes needed to pass the measure had been a foregone conclusion for days, but with four council members running for mayor and five more seeking reelection to the council next year, the suspense rested on who would claim credit. Council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), a mayoral candidate who has been working to burnish his credentials with business leaders, cast a decisive no-vote against the Wal-Mart bill in September.

Obama throws support to minimum wage movement in economy speech | World news Barack Obama warned that a "relentless, decades-long trend" of growing inequality and social immobility posed a fundamental threat to the American dream on Wednesday, throwing his support behind a grassroots movement to address chronically low wages across the US. Attempting to regain the political momentum after a calamitous two months in which his healthcare reforms were plagued by website failures, the president said reversing the growing gap between rich and poor was "the defining challenge of our time". In a speech delivered in one of the poorest areas of Washington DC, Obama said: “The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe.” The federal minimum wage currently stands at $7.25 an hour, or about $15,000 a year. "That’s why it’s well past the time to raise a minimum wage that, in real terms right now, is below where it was when Harry Truman was in office."

BlackPeopleMeet.com - Black Dating Network for Black Singles Raising Minimum Wage Is Misguided Policy - Room for Debate Douglas Holtz-Eakin is the president of the American Action Forum. He was the director of the Congressional Budget Office and a chief economist of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. The protests, ballot initiatives and other efforts aimed at the the minimum (or living) wage are not political events. They reflect a real economic problem: the growing distress of the millions of out-of-work and lower-wage workers trapped by a failed response to the Great Recession and the ensuing anemic recovery. With 11.3 million people looking for work, it is simply perverse to redistribute from the job seekers to the job holders. Increasing the minimum wage is a misguided way to address the situation. According to recent American Action Forum research, 80 percent of minimum wage workers are not actually in poverty, increasing the federal minimum to $10, as some have proposed, wouldn't benefit 99 percent of the people in poverty. Who would be helped by a minimum wage increase?

Raising American Wages…by Raising American Wages With Americans still trapped in the fifth year of our Great Recession, and median personal income having been essentially stagnant for forty years, perhaps we should finally admit that decades of economic policies have largely failed. The last two years of our supposed recovery have seen American growth rates averaging well under 2 percent.[i] Although our media often pays greater attention to the recent gains in stock market and asset prices, such paltry growth means that many of the millions of jobs lost in 2008 and 2009 will never be regained, and the broadest measures of American unemployment and underemployment will remain stuck in the vicinity of 15%.[ii] Meanwhile, an astonishing 93% of the total increase in income during the recovery period has been captured by the top one percent of earners, who now hold almost as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent of our society. Consider that only 20% of current jobs require even a bachelors’ degree. Graphic by New America Foundation

Young Dro - F.D.B. (Explicit) South-Western: Increase in the Minimum Wage Policy Debate: Does an increase in the minimum wage result in a higher unemployment rate? Issues and Background Minimum wage laws in the U.S. were first introduced during the 1930s in response to the Great Depression. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) established a national minimum wage of $0.25 an hour. Introductory economics textbooks usually first introduce the minimum wage as an application of demand and supply analysis. the labor market is perfectly competitive, the minimum wage covers all workers, and worker productivity is unaffected by the wage rate. Under these assumptions, the effect of the minimum wage is quite straightforward: the introduction of a minimum wage results in unemployment in those labor markets in which the equilibrium wage rate is below the minimum wage. In the labor market illustrated above, the equilibrium wage would be w* and the equilibrium level of employment would be L* in the absence of a minimum wage. Primary Resources and Data