RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE: DON'T STOP NOW!

I don't agree with your theory and I wonder where the figures you throw out come from. You don't give a source. I have been a minimum wage employee a few times in my life, and I have seen positions, (jobs) cut because of mandated increases in the minimum wage. In the current economy, I can't speak for the rest of the country, but in my part of the country, you can not hire anyone at the minimum wage. Places like MacDonalds and Burger King are paying at least $2.00 above the minimum wage and still find it hard to get people to work.
Fred

As a print and broadcast reporter, editor and commentator specializing in labor issues over the past 50 years, I deal in facts and not theory. It’s a fact that, as I wrote, the minimum wage is a poverty wage and the government thus is not abiding by the law that says the minimum should be set high enough to guarantee a decent standard of living.

Nor is it a theory that this very wealthy country could afford better, or a theory that more than one-third of those paid the minimum are the sole or main support of their families, and that many of them have to rely on government welfare to survive. I wasn’t theorizing, either, when I noted that the number of jobs has increased rather than decreased after each of the 19 times the minimum has been raised.

If it is true, as you say, that “in my part of the country, you can not hire anyone at the minimum wage,” then that would argue for a raise in the minimum, would it not?

My information comes from a wide variety of academic, labor, business and government sources and from my own work covering the subject as a journalist. If I may say so, I think you’re making the common error of generalizing from your own limited experience.

Dick Meister