Minimum Wage Rising - Alex Gross

Possible Minimum Wage Growth
This CNBC article about minimum wage discusses the raise of minimum wage to fifteen dollars in Seattle, and how this would work in the rest of the country. The article has some evidence that workers tend to work less when their wages are raised drastically, which caused some companies to have to raise their prices for the first time in decades. The minimum wage in Seattle in 2014 was around nine dollars, and a bill was passed that said that by 2021 the minimum wage would be $15 dollars. All of the evidence used in this article comes from Seattle because their minimum wage is now around $14 and nearing its set point for next year, however Seattle is a very booming economy right now as said in this article, so it would be very difficult to use this for judging what the federal minimum wage would be. Personally, I think that raising minimum wage to 15 on a federal level would not be a very smart decision in the eyes of our country as a whole, because many businesses would suffer. Currently, our seven dollar and twenty-five cent minimum wage minimum is only observed by 20 states. This means that the majority of the states decided independently that they would raise it above this level. In most of these states with the 7.25 dollar minimum allowed by law, there is either a very low cost of living, or the companies have to raise the wage above this level if there are no employee benefits. Every state has something different about its wage than all the others, and if the federal rate was raised to 15 dollars an hour, most companies would keep it at exactly 15. This would cause a disassembly of the economic balance we have throughout the different states, because people with a twice as high cost of living, would be making as much as someone who lives somewhere MUCH cheaper. I believe that if there is any change made to minimum wage, it can not happen all at once because the average consumer in America will be paying much more for their goods, and companies will go out of business left and right. This would cause some states to immediately more than double their minimum wages, and cause years of economic stress on our country. If there was a much more gradual and subtle change to the federal minimum wage rate however, it would be feasible and could possibly be helpful to our economy.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/02/seattle-passed-a-15-minimum-wage-law-in-2014-heres-how-its-turned-out-so-far.html


Comments

  1. Ariana LukMarch 29, 2020 at 1:59 PM

    Interesting article, I was just wondering if this is minimum wage fluctuating will the wages for middle class change too or will the middle class workers also become minimum wage workers? Because if the wages for minimum wage increase would the wages above rise as well, then would the prices for everyday items in markets and grocery stores follow this upward trend? And eventually would all prices rise and even out everything until we're back at the place we started?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Isaak TownsendMarch 29, 2020 at 8:46 PM

    This Seems good but would this increase prices for other things like fast food because they have to pay their workers more or would this make people work at McDonald's for the rest of there lives and make the jobs harder to get or more people would get laid off of work. I Think that it sounds good but when its actually implemented it will do little to nothing

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Prisoners Design What They Can't Buy- Luke

Luke Kirchner      I chose to read the article "Objects Made by Prisoners in the United States". This was a very interesting article, as it showed what it's like to be in an American prison and how they make some objects. When Prisoners are in prison, the severity of their punishments can vary, but the lack of creative freedom is often detrimental to each prisoner. This lack of freedom can sometimes drive their creativity to make their own objects, showing off individual expression. Some items like pens and toothbrushes were not given in the full form, due to the fear of prisoners turning them into weapons. Instead, the prisoners thought about how they could fix these problems. The article says "The items shown here, made by inmates in the U.S. prison system, illustrate the severity of restrictions imposed on prisoners as well as the human instinct to persevere through creativity and invention" (The Atlantic).      They took the ink cartridge for the pen an
Read more

Josey - The Fashion Industries Effect on the Enviroment

           Clothing production around the world has doubed since the year 2000, making the fashion indsutry the second biggest polluter in the world. The impact of the indsutry on the enviroment has always been substantial, but in recent years as it has continued to grow, the impact has grown with it. It is estimated that aproximately every second a truck load of clothing is dumped or burned in a landfill. Not only is this a huge amount of resources, but it is also clothing that could easily be reworn or recycled. This is an extremely wasteful amount and is not only affecting the resources that are used, but also the workers who are being forced to produce materials at extremely fast rates.            Wasting these materials is one of the major ways that this is having an effect on the enviroment but another is the waste that is produced and put into the enviroment. Often when factories produce clothing, once they are done they dump chemicals from the factory into rivers. These chemic
Read more

Recovering Ecosystems

Tyler Holland Mr. Roddy IHSS 26 March 2020 Recovering Ecosystems A large challenge for stopping the increasing problems that we face with air pollution and other environmental problems, is that humans are natural control freaks. People try so hard to invent new ways to control the risks that our Earth faces instead of just trying to let nature do its work. Isabella and Charlie, a couple who owned farmland in England, came to the realization that nature solves its own problems, after they had a run in with a feared weed for many farmers. Once they discovered the 'cursed thistle' in their farms they feared the worst as it spread so quickly, but they had decided to let it happen because using pesticides and chemicals was not an option for them. After a while they started to see a flourishing environment in their acres that they had not seen there before, painted lady butterflies flew across the land and after a while caterpillars were crawling all over their 60 acres and ea
Read more