Persuasive Essay: The Minimum Wage Debate

The Minimum Wage Debate Everyone requires money as a means of survival, and a way to success. In order for people to get the necessities required to live life, money must be a viable source. Therefore, when money was scare during the Great Depression, president Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced, what the world now knows as the federal minimum wage. Having been signed in 1938 at .25 cents per hours, the minimum wage was established to stabilize the post depression-economy, by creating a minimum standard of living to protect the health and well-being of people in the workforce (Legal Information Institute, n.d.). Ever since that early start, the national minimum wage has increased 22 times, with the last time being induced in 2009 during the

For a person working full-time at the federal minimum wage makes 7.25 an hour, with around 15,080 per year (Smith), only accounting for 20 percent higher than the poverty line cut off for a family of one (U.S.Department of Labor, 2016). Meanwhile, for a single-parent family of two, this annual income only accounts for nine percent above the poverty line (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016). With this low of a percent above the poverty line, many people are struggling to live comfortably, which is what the minimum wage was established to do. However, a recent report from the 2014 Congressional Budget Office, and a study conducted by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst suggests that with a raise many Americans will find themselves out of the struggling annual low incomes, and poverty levels. For instance, the 2014 Congressional Budget Office reported that if the minimum wage was raised to nine dollars, over 300,000 Americans would find themselves leaving poverty in the past. They also concluded that if the raise was raised to a $10.10, an additional 600,000 people would be lifted from poverty’s threshold, granting 900,000 citizens the option to live their standard lives (Congressional Budget Office, 2014). In relation to the Congressional Budget Office Report, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s economist Arindrajit