By the year 2021 California will have minimum wage of fifteen dollars an hour. Lawmakers, Gov. Jerry Brown and labor unions signed a law in California that will start incremental increases to the state's minimum wage starting Jan. 1, 2017. Should the rest of the country follow in California’s footsteps? If the government increases the federal minimum wage it would, overall, hurt the nation. With a fifteen dollar minimum wage unemployment would increase as well as a higher pticed market. Even though some may say that one cannot live off the current minimum wage, the government should not raise the federal minimum wage. In 1938 the first federal minimum wage was introduced by Franklin D. Roosevelt and started at 25 cents and hour, equivalent to 4 dollars now. Throughout the years the minimum wage has only risen, but has fluctuated in worth. As of the year 1980 the federal minimum wage has stayed below of an equivalent 8.80 2012 dollars. More recently, since 2000 the minimum wage has held an average of 6.85 dollars. The U.S. has done fine with a low minimum wage, there is room for improvement when it comes to economics, but raising the minimum wage is not the way to go. One of the first outcomes of …show more content…
The University of New Hampshire Survey Center conducted a survey of 1400 economists for the Employment Policies Institute on how they felt about a 15 dollar federal minimum wage. These are the results. Nearly three-quarters of these US-based economists opposed the increased minimum wage due to the fact that it will have negative effects on youth employment levels (83%), adult employment levels (52%), and the number of jobs available (76%). 80% of the economists also believed that employers will hire entry-level positions with greater skills, minimizing the employment rate of 50.4% workers (ages 16-24). Clearly, those educated in the field oppose the subject, why shouldn’t