How Raising Minimum Wages Will Affect Us In an article written by Wesley Coopersmith, Minimum wage: more harm that good, of Americans for prosperity, published on December 19, 2013, Coppersmith argues what problems could happen if the minimum wage is raised to $15 an hour. Coppersmith starts off by saying that President Obama called for an increase in minimum wages to help people who are struggling in the United States, but Coppersmith does not seem like he agrees with that because of what other harm it could possibly cause. He says that raising minimum wages may cause unemployment, that it will hurt those who are less skilled, and that if minimum wages increase then the price of our necessities will also increase. Coopersmith’s argument …show more content…
Students in high school, and college usually work for minimum wage, and they usually are working to help themselves out, such as have extra money for themselves, or to pay rent if they are in college. He also says that the minimum wage will only affect the people with lower incomes which is not true. It will somewhat affect the middle class people as well, and the people with high incomes will still have to pay for it through their food, gas, and taxes. Another assumption in this article is when he says that only the people who have dinner at McDonalds and the ones who shop at Walmart are the ones with low incomes. That is not completely true, not only low income people shop at Walmart, and eat at McDonalds. Some people who are well off eat at McDonalds because they just like that food, and they sometimes shop at Walmart because they have good deals, not because they have low incomes. Coppersmith does have rhetorical devices in his article. He uses downplays often, especially when he talks about only poor people eating McDonalds. He also uses dysphemisms, an example of that would be when he talks about the “less-skilled.” Coppersmith states in this article that raising the minimum wage is an ineffective way to help Americans out of poverty. He says that the way to help is to create more jobs, and employ people without jobs, instead of having a high unemployment rate and only having very few people employed, and getting paid