Should The Government Raise Minimum Wage?

The federal government and the state government spend a lot of money helping out the poor. They help the unemployed, the sick those who work full time jobs but cannot provide for their families. Raising the minimum wage would save the government money because a raise to $10.10 would take 1.7 million people off of various types of public assistance. The higher minimum wage would result in a less expensive food stamp program. Raising the minimum wage would result in a 6 percent cut in the amount of money the program needs to operate. This 6 percent cut would result in a savings of $4.6 billion dollars annually. This is only one of the government assistance programs that would benefit from a higher minimum wage. There are several other programs that would require less money if Americans relied on them less. Overall, the federal government alone could stand to save $7.6 billion dollars from all of these programs because 27 million American workers would be receiving a wage that they could live on. This money could then be reallocated to give greater help to those

Restaurant owners, facing a higher wage bill, would like to pass the costs on to their customers. But their customers are people whose incomes have not been affected much, if at all, by the higher minimum wage. So if prices at the restaurants go up, these people will buy less and the restaurants will now lose some profits. They may raise prices a bit, but not much. Whatever they do, the restaurant owners will have to, if you’ll pardon the term, eat some of the increased costs. The point is that, with the increase of the minimum wage, firms that face higher costs cannot maintain profits simply by raising prices regardless of demand for their products. While the increase of the minimum wage will increase demand for those products purchased by low-income people, it will not yield an equal increase in demand for all