One major economic issue going on in the United States is whether or not minimum wage should have been increased or should be increased again. With so many families living below the poverty line in recent years, everyone feels something needs to be done. It was found that a family of four earning $20,444 was living in poverty. We can't develop a huge gap between the wealthy and the middle class because we can look at people's salaries and see how big the difference is. In 2007 minimum wage was increased from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour. Some people greatly supported this change but others don't think it's the solution to or problems. Along with the increase in wages, there were significant tax cuts to businesses. Those who are against raising the minimum wage say that there definitely shouldn't have been more tax cuts to businesses because there were so many just recently. They also say that it only affects a small number of the workforce, mostly teenagers, which wouldn't dig us out of this recession we're in. On the flip side, some people believe it will improve our economy a lot. They say that it was completely unfair for people who were working full time and earning minimum wage to still be below the poverty line. If anything, minimum wage should be able to keep them at the line or slightly higher. Since more people will be making more money, they will spend more of it, thus boosting business revenue and the total income of the United States all together.
Poverty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty
Salaries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary
I personally think that increasing the minimum wage was necessary, but I don't think it needed to be quite as drastic. Since many of the minimum wage jobs are taken by teenagers, who usually aren't supporting a family, I don't think they should earn as much as a mom or dad working to feed their children. Also, the businesses shouldn't have received such large tax cuts. Doing both of these things at the same time greatly reduced the amount of money the government was taking in, and in hard times like these, we should have eased into this process. Also, raising the minimum wage brought them just to the poverty line. They won't have extra money to spend like people were saying. The only people who may have extra spending money would be those teenagers, but with college costs so high, many of them are looking to save that money so they aren't in a pool of debt when they graduate. I just don't think raising the minimum wage helped our problems. House majority leader Richard Armey also believed that increasing minimum wage was not a good idea. In face he promised to fight President Bush on increasing minimum wage with "every fiber of his body." If someone as high up as him sees the downsides to this, why didn't others?
Issue #1:http://http://katieb123456.blogspot.com/
Issue #3: http://dparkinblogs.blogspot.com/
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