THE US SHOULD INCREASE THE MINIMUM WAGE FROM $7.25 PER HOUR 2
The US Congress Should increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour?
For quite some time, the national debate is mostly centered on whether or not the federal
minimum wage should be raised. The current minimum wage has been put at $7.25 per hour.
However, President Obama had advocated that the amount be raised gradually to about $10 per
hour (Williams, 2009). The minimum wage should be raised to $10 per hour because it tends to
have numerous benefits.
There are several reasons as to why the minimum wage should be increased from $7.5 to
approximately $10. Firstly, it is believed that the federal minimum wage has not kept up with the
different inflation rates. Therefore, the specific pay of many of the American workers, and in
particular those that tend to have families of three or more individuals are now below the poverty
levels. Research shows that the federal minimum wage has since 2009 stagnated at $7.5. This in
turn has resulted in millions of individuals living in America struggling in poverty despite the
fact that they have full-time jobs (Doucouliagos & Staneley, 2009). Though, most of the
Americans tend to work approximately 40 hours a week or more, their wages tend to be low
enough, meaning that most of them must rely on benefits from SNAP as well as other kinds of
public assistance. The present minimum wage tends to economically marginalize millions of
Americans who in most cases have the capacity of generating growth in the economy.
There are numerous reasons as to why raising the minimum wage is important. Firstly,
raising the minimum to approximately 10$ per page will raise the living standards of
impoverished workers. Research done by the CBO found out that raising the amount to $10 per
hour could eventually up lift the lives of 900,000 individuals from poverty. The numbers were
obtained from observing the present poverty rates of low wage employees (Sowell, 2004). This
