November 7th, 2016

Dear, Future President,

I must state that we should not raise the minimum wage. A huge issue in today’s society is the problem of poverty. Many citizens are terrified because their current minimum wage job is not enough money to help them continue living. Many protests have stressed the issue, and many people want the minimum wage to be around doubled the original amount. This means that current wage of $7.25 would be $15.00. If this minimum wage increase happened, what does this mean for the rest of the country? What would happened to the businesses, people, and overall economy? What many people don't realize is that raising the minimum wage would lead to a disaster of problems including age majorities, education disputes, less jobs, unemployment, business issues, poverty, and pricings.

By raising minimum wage, you would have to factor that over half of the current minimum wage workers are young students and adults. Jason Pye states “Of those workers earning minimum wage, 50.6% are between the ages of 16 and 24.”(Pye) If we raised the pay, over half of the employees would have no need to benefit from the change. Overall, we would not want to overpay people money they didn’t need.

The jobs that pay minimum wage can be a variety of options. From store employees, a fast food worker, or a building janitor, all these jobs require little to no education. Why should we ever raise the pay of a job so simple for any individual. Most adults (older than 24 years) do not have a proper full education in order to work at a middle class level pay.

If the minimum wage was raised to $15, you would have to factor in the demand of employees businesses would need. Raising minimum wage would mean businesses would be paying more money to their employees resulting into them lowering their supply of them. Even if we just raised the minimum wage a little less than $3, The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says “Estimated that a proposed $10.10 wage, once fully implemented, would reduce total employment by about 500,000 workers.”(Stoll) Raising the minimum wage would just end up destroying job opportunities.

Since jobs would be lost if we increased the minimum wage, there would also be a huge problem. Of those companies who would unemploy workers, they would try to keep their best employees. Those employees are usually young adults still attending college. The people who would need the money from the jobs the most would unfortunately be the ones who would most likely be removed of their job. Increasing minimum wage would overall not benefit even those of the workers who need the extra money.

For smaller businesses, increasing minimum wage would make the businesses fall apart. Most businesses struggle with their first 2 years of opening due to the debts they must pay off. “Data shows us that approximately 50 percent of businesses will only survive through their first five years.”(Jordan) Adding an implement of paying their employees double the original cost would severely hurt the owners. Not only will this close those business job opportunities, but will most have those small companies ran out of business.

By increasing minimum wage, the whole point of the act would be to decrease the unemployment rate and eliminate poverty. The problem is that people in poverty are mostly not employed nor are they looking for jobs even if they were to be paid more. Only a very few amount of people in poverty would benefit from this. “According to a 2012 review by Mark Wilson. “If the minimum were today raised to $9.50, only 11% percent of workers who would gain live in poor households.””(Cato) By increasing minimum wage, it would not affect the poverty like people would expect.

Finally, by increasing minimum wage, it would negatively affect all of America. With a pay increase, it leads to a chain flow of effects. Jobs would have to pay their workers more, so if they don’t cut their employees, they must raise their product pricing in order to obtain the revenue to pay off their workers. From this, America’s product pricing will increase overall majorly hurting the middle and upper classes. “The NFIB predicts that pay increase will lead to layoffs and price hikes, as well as force some employers to close their doors altogether.”(Gibson)

In conclusion, raising minimum wage would be a huge problem if it were to occur. Too many problems would spike up from this change. Overall, the minimum wage increase would not benefit the people who need money the most. The best answer to resolving the issue to poverty would NOT be increasing minimum wage, in fact it would make poverty worse.

Respectfully,

Daniel Snodgrass