Raise the Minimum Wage? Oh No?
Before today's class, I viewed minimum wage as a good plan in helping those who are impoverished. I thought that all minimum wage did was make sure business owners were taking care of their workers. I looked on the internet and found this article on minimum wage. The author talks about how Congress is discussing raising the minimum wage by $1.50. The author says that most unions and liberal anti-poverty organizations are for this change. The author presents the opposing side being mostly business communities and conservatives. He also quickly shows that little evidence has been found that an increase in minimum wage makes unemployment rates rise.
I thought this article highlighted a couple important things to the reader. First of all, it is very clear where the author stands on the idea of raising minimum wage because he takes very little time to show the negative side to this $1.50 raise. He also stereotypes those opposed as "conservatives" and "business communities," making the opposing side look as if they are afraid of change or looking out for the business first. The author also says that "minimum wage are generally supported by unions and liberal anti-poverty organizations." This makes the reader think well the unions and anti-poverty people are for it so it must be good. I would be really interested to see the figures on who supports a raise and who doesn't.
There is also no suggestions for an alternative plan. I think that articles like this are what makes people not think about the economics of a situation. The economics are clearly not well represented. If this raise to the minimum wage does happen I have a feeling many people will be confused by the reverse affect on the market.
1 comment:
I think that raise minimum wage in some way is a good thing to make the market more efficient. Because it produces some unemployment, and just this unemployment will make people take care of their job and work hard. Let’s suppose that a world where there is no unemployment, it means that no people need to worry about that they will out of job. As a result, since they can easily find another job, there must be a few people that will not work as hard as they do when they are afraid of being fired. In this case, although with the same wage expensive a company could engage more workers, the efficiency of a company may be lower for their workers become lazier.
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