So, by the Congressional Budget Office's median estimate,1.3 million workers who would otherwise be employed would be rendered jobless is the minimum wage went to $15 a hour.
I guess this number of 1.3 million workers is little more then pure scare tactics. After all, I'd guess at least 2 million workers will loose their jobs just to pure business greed. Sure the business will throw up a smokescreen and say that it is for some other reason. Also, for a wide variety of reasons, a sizeable share of low-wage workers routinely cycle in and out of employment. If you have ever worked at a business that payed it's employees less then $15 an hour you know how often faces in a workplace change.
The CBO goes on to say more: Families whose income is below the poverty threshold would receive an additional $8 billion in real family income in 2025 with a $15 per hour minimum wage. The extra income would move, on net, roughly 1.3 million people out of poverty. For families above the poverty line, real income would fall by about $16 billion, a 0.1 percent reduction in total income.
As the country's current low minimum wage costs taxpayers more than $100 billion a year because nearly half of working families rely on government programs such as Medicaid or SNAP, this will be a good thing. Workers are also customers. The current minimum wage keeps workers in poverty, and that hurts businesses as well as workers. Raising the minimum wage is a powerful way to boost businesses and the economy because it puts money in the hands of people who most need to spend it. Affected workers who work year round would earn an extra $3,000 a year—enough to make a tremendous difference in the life of a preschool teacher, bank teller, or fast-food worker who today struggles to get by on around $20,000 a year. A $15 minimum wage would begin to reverse decades of growing pay inequality between the lowest-paid workers and the middle class. A $15 minimum wage by 2024 would generate $120 billion in higher wages for workers and would also benefit their communities. Because lower-paid workers spend much of their extra earnings, this injection of wages will help stimulate the economy and spur greater business activity and job growth.
The typical worker who would benefit from a $15 minimum wage is a 35-year-old woman with some college-level coursework who works full time. Not just on the coasts, but all across the country, workers will soon need at least $15 an hour By 2024, in areas all across the United States, a single adult without children will need at least $31,200—what a full-time worker making $15 an hour earns annually—to achieve a modest but adequate standard of living. Workers in costlier areas and those with children will need even more.
Workers in many skilled jobs—widely considered to be middle-class jobs—struggle to get by on less than $15 an hour today and would benefit from a $15 minimum wage. Raising the national minimum wage is well overdue. Workers today who are paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour are, after adjusting for inflation, paid 29 percent less than their counterparts 50 years ago. This is despite the fact that the economy’s capacity to deliver higher wages has doubled in the last 50 years, as measured by labor productivity, or the amount of output produced by workers.
I can easily point to the pointed to the grocery workers, small factory workers, service workers and low-wage earners of many other types who have kept the food supply and other necessities available during the pandemic as people who are deserving of pay hike. If folks are essential workers, we ought to pay them an essential wage. It’s the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do.
Raising the minimum wage is immensely popular; it’s supported by around 70% of voters, including a substantial majority of self-identified Republicans. Or if you don’t believe polls, look at what happened in Florida back in November: even as Donald Trump carried the state, a referendum on raising the minimum wage to $15 won in a landslide. A rise to $15 an hour would reverse decades of growing pay inequality between the lowest-paid workers and the middle class, and indexing future increases would prevent any future growth in that gap.
We should all support a policy that would improve living standards for workers across the U.S.
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