Persuasive Essay: Raising Minimum Wage

Christopher Rosa

Prof. Click

ENG 001A

4/11/2015

Raise the Minimum Wage; Raise the Minimum Success

In President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress, he called for a higher minimum wage. The consumer spending of the minimum wage was the highest in the 60s at. Most of the efforts to raise the minimum wage focuses on getting back the purchasing power to its 60s level, setting a target of around ten dollars hourly for this or the next year. Every year that the minimum wage stays identical, increasing prices slowly erode its true value, leaving workers that have an income below the poverty line will not enough money to as much as it could in the year before. This is a disadvantage the well being of minimum wage workers in low

Most opponents of a consistent minimum wage claim that a higher minimum wage will boost the purchasing power of the poor population and thus benefit the economy. For example, Danziger Leif, a professor of economics at Yale University, claims that,“ For example, when Tommy is talking to the coach, the editors cut to a shot that shows the reaction of the opposing team. Before the fight began, there weren’t so many cuts; however, when the fight kicked off, there were suddenly a tons of cuts shortly after each other.” (Leif 3). In other words, if the government raises the minimum wage from $7.25 to $8, the amount of people that have an income below the poverty line would decrease by 2.4%. As Edward Kennedy, a former United States Senator and member of the Democratic Party, claims, raising the minimum wage,“[is] a straightforward way to help low salary, hourly workers and to condemn the increasing income inequality, give people money, and increase consumer spending” (Kennedy 6). Simply put, by raising the minimum wage, the low salary workers will have more purchasing power. The assumption is that people will buy more when they have more purchasing power, and thus, ameliorate the

An argument that they often use is that the minimum wage hike appeals equally likely, if not more likely, to illegal immigrants than it does to legal workers. According to Theodore Palivos, a professor of Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics at the University of Macedonia, “the effect of the minimum wage increase is detrimental to the wage how the wage reacts to a change in the minimum wage of employment in the US. If this change is small, illegal immigration falls following a rise in the US because the effect of the goes up in the expected wage” (Palivos 25). In other words, the effect of the minimum wage hike is determined by the degree to which the employment is sensitive to the minimum wage increase. If the employment’s sensitivity to the minimum wage hike is slight, Illegal immigration will eventually rise in the US because illegal immigrants are attracted by the raised minimum wage. If the elasticity is small, illegal immigration falls following a rise in the US because the effect of the increase in the expected wage” (Palivos 25). In other words, the effect of the minimum wage hike is determined by the degree to which the employment is sensitive to the minimum wage increase. If the employment’s sensitivity to the minimum wage hike is slight, illegal immigration will eventually rise in the US because illegal immigrants are attracted by the raised minimum