The debate has raged for the last 2 years, should we raise the minimum wage or not?  Among those who are championing the proposed hike to as much as 15 dollars an hour is those whom say they cannot afford to raise a family on $7-8 dollars an hour. So let us examine what the statistics say about this.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics: "Minimum wage workers tend to be young. Although workers under age 25 represented only about one-fifth of hourly paid workers, they made up about half of those paid the Federal minimum wage or less. Among employed teenagers paid by the hour, about 12 percent earned the minimum wage, compared with about 1.2 percent of workers age 25 and over."

In the world of economics it is very simple, you are what you eat. That is you are worth what you can produce. The 3% of adult workers who are making the minimum wage, do not have any skills. Furthermore, many of those whom are unemployed, cannot find work because they are not worth $7.25 an hour.  You might say that is harsh, I call it a dose of realism.  The purpose of minimum wages jobs is to allow inexperienced workers to gain experience. Once the worker has the requisite experience, he/she can move on to a higher paying job. Those workers, like Ms. Coleman, who say they need a $15 dollar an hour wage to raise their family, are unfortunately not skilled enough to demand those kind of wages. In addition, if the MINIMUM wage is set at $15 an hour, what happens to the incentive to better ones self? Well, the incentive to gain more skills runs out the door and the incentive to become educated is driving the getaway car!

But wait!  Things are getting worse in this country! We must stand up and fight against the greedy business owners!  Wrong again. According to the BLS: The proportion of hourly paid workers earning the prevailing federal minimum wage or less declined from 5.2 percent in 2011 to 4.7 percent in 2012. This remains well below the figure of 13.4 percent in 1979, when data were first collected on a regular basis.

Here is my final answer. We should not raise the minimum wage. If we do it will price young and inexperienced workers out of the market and will not allow them to gain the necessary experience they need to garner higher wages.

The list above is very simple and not exhaustive. However, it does start the debate as to who is responsible for the well being of our countries workers.  Is it corporations like Wal-Mart?  Is it their responsibility to create high paying jobs? I would argue that those whom work at Wal-Mart as free to leave and go to a different place of employment I they are not happy with the wages. The contrarian viewpoint to this article is that those workers are stuck in low paying jobs where they have no chance for advancement. What is your opinion? Does Wal-Mart have a higher responsibility to its shareholders, customers or employees?

Overall, what little bit of good is done by the increase in minimum wage, is overshadowed by the unintended consequences. According to Jeffery Dorfman, "If the aim is to redistribute income without people noticing because the government role in the process is once removed, raising the minimum wage might be a good choice. However, if the goal is to help workers in or near poverty to earn a better living, the policy fails due to its poor focus and extraordinary cost relative to the reduction in poverty. We can do better by poor workers than this."

Please feel free to chime in with your own opinions below

Well here we go again. The CBO, (Congressional Budget Office), came out with a report that says raising the Federal Minimum Wage to $10.10 an hour would lift 900,000 people out of poverty. Awesome! Less poor people! Well, there is one problem. There are 45 million people that will be below the poverty line this year so this is barely a 2% decrease in the amount of people in poverty.  Why not do it you ask? Because that same report says raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would cost 500,000 jobs!. That means there will not be as many people available to pay for the goods these minimum wage workers are producing.

We had an earlier post that explained in detail how raising the minimum wage would cost jobs

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