Future President

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Future President,

As a newly elected president, there are many decisions that you will need to make. One policy that needs to be looked at is raising the minimum wage. I am a 16-year-old male that works at Wendy’s. I have a single mom with two younger siblings. I attend Oxford High and play basketball as an afterschool activity. I have to help my mom with bills and my brothers, so I had to get a job. I get paid $7.26 per hour and can only work 8 hours a day.

On July 24,2009 U.S. federal minimum wage was set at $7.25 per hour. In 2014 Congressional Budget Office reported,  "a person who works full time at the federal minimum wage earns $15,080 in a single year, which is only 20% more than the 2015 federal poverty level of $12,331 for just a one person household" (http://minimum-wage.procon.org/).

"By raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10, it would inject around $22.1 billion net into the economy and open up about 85,00 new jobs in a three-year time limit," according to the Economic Policy Institute. Jobs that are opening up from raising minimum wage could help struggling parents/young adults to support their families, like me. When I was young my parents used to depend on the government assistant programs. We would have to use food stamps cards to pay for our groceries, so we could have food at home. The Economic Policy Institute determined that by increasing the minimum wage more than 1.7 million Americans would no longer depend on the government assistant programs.

A 2014 study by Alex Smith, PhD, and Assistant Professor of Economics at the United States Military Academy at West Point stated, “school attendance would increase and the high school dropout rate would decrease if the minimum wage were raised.” Teens who live in poverty are twice as likely to miss 3 to 5 days of school a month according to a 2014 study. Increasing the minimum wage for students’ means they can work fewer hours for the same amount of pay, which will give them free time to study. Increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 will lead to a 2-4 % decreased in high school students drop out.

People can argue and say raising the minimum wage would hurt the economy, but think about all the positive impacts that can come from it. Please future president, be the hero and help out with the struggling working class.

Sincerely, Braden M.