Raising Minimum Wage Essay

An occurring topic in society today is raising the minimum wage. Minimum wage is the least amount of payment per hour an employer is allowed to give an employee ( a person working for an organization for a salary) for work legally. The national minimum wage is $7.25, but some states have raised it a little bit higher, due to the reason that different states have different costs of living. Currently the national minimum wage is still under $15 an hour. In the United States, 77.2 million workers of ages 16 and above were paid hourly in 2014. Out of those who were paid hourly, 58.7% were wage and salary workers. The number of hourly paid people that receive the national minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is 1.3 million, and about 1.7 million received wages below the national minimum wage. Added all the together, 3 million workers received wages at or below the national minimum wage [1]. Minimum wage is to insure protection for workers in the labor force, and provide the necessary standards of living (health, security, etc) especially for those apart of the lower class, but studies have shown that $7.25 per hour is not a living wage for the lower class. It is not enough to support

A significant detail of recovering the economy is the increasing of a person’s consumer power. Consumer power being that amount of services and goods an individual can buy with a certain payment of money. Raising the national minimum wage increases the amount of money workers receive. The increase in the amount of money workers receive boosts consumer spending. The boosting of consumer spending leads to an increase in demand for the services and goods the workers can now afford. As they are spending, all of this money drives a growth in the economy. Basically, since people (workers) will be paid $15 an hour, the more money the people (workers) spend or can spend, the more money goes back into the economy