Reagan's Minimum Wage

the country would dissipate and all faith would need to lie in the hands of the large corporations. Furthermore, while Johnson believed in direct government support for solving the unemployment crisis, Reagan 's approach was through the power of taxes. He supported an extension of the Targeted Job Tax Credit Program. The extension would provide an incentive for employers to hire a greater number of disadvantaged youth by allowing them to receive tax credits as much as 85 percent on the first $3,000 of wage they pay (Reagan 1984). While this does seem logical in creating a motivation to hire low-income youth, it also has the ruling that they only need to be hired for 120 work hours (HRD-91-33). As a result, business who chose to accept

He believed that it was not the place of the federal government to tell companies how much they should pay their workers. Along with this, Reagan thought that companies would naturally raise their wages in order to keep their employees from going to other employers with higher wages. Competition between corporations would cause the salary of civilians to go up and the minimum wage would be irrelevant. Theoretically, this may work, but it failed and not create a safety net for citizens. Some workers would have no choice but to work minimum wage and this amount of money is barely possible, if not impossible, to live on. Reagan made no effort to raise the minimum wage and this forced those in poverty to not be able to have a proper standard of living. As the economy grew, their wages would not change and the poor would be left behind in a world of constant

He once said, "people who are sleeping on grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice" in an interview on "Good Morning America" (Reagan). This was followed by the Reagan administration halving the public housing budget to about $17.5 billion (Drier, para. 12). President Reagan 's philosophy of a limited government had no place for creating houses. Constructing companies should not be regulated in their building and be able to compete with one another for making the cheapest and most popular living spaces for citizens. His quote also shows that he believes when citizens wanted to leave destitution and rise out of living in housing projects, they could do so through their own willpower. This shows his callousness towards a life of poverty and his tendency to resort to blaming. No one truly wants to live in the worst setting and feel like they are helpless, poor, and non-contributors to society. His lack of care for those who lived in the poorest housing or no housing at all showed how little he understood about the correlation between economic growth and living environment. It seems illogical for a child living in the poorest and worst urban areas to feel a sense of inspiration to go out and strive for a better future when everything around him represents the idea that the government does not want him to succeed. These impoverished