October 26th, 2016

Dear Future President,

Hello there president, did you know that the federal minimum wage was $7.25? It is also shown as a $5 bill, two $1 bills, and a quarter. That is the least you can legally get in the U.S. for one hour of work. I want to tell you why this isn’t enough and why you should raise the minimum wage. I hope you will agree with me by the end of this letter. After all, I’ll give you every reason to. Continue reading my letter if you wish to know of my opinion on the matter of minimum wage.

First of all, raising the minimum wage would decrease poverty. I know a lot of people will say that the business making less money will make businesses unable to run the minimum wage, but it won’t. There will be more people with more money to buy more goods which decreases poverty and the business gets more money. This should help lower poverty rates and counteract any hardships a business may go through due to them having to pay more for workers. Since there is a lot of poverty in the U.S. currently, I think this would help quite a lot. This has been my first reason for my opinion on the matter of minimum wage.

My next reason for raising the minimum wage is that you can’t survive on $7.25 an hour. Think about it, you have to buy food every day, pay taxes, get housing, clothes, and more. If you work 8 hours, 6 day a week you would make 18,145.72. This may seem like a lot but after expenses you won’t think so. This is assuming you only get 52 days off in a year. If you wanted to buy a house you would almost definitely need a loan unless you wanted to wait for a few decades. Then, with all your expenses you would run into debt and owe a lot of money. Not to mention you would probably have student loans if you went to college. The fact is that if you live in a big city with high prices, or almost anywhere in the U.S. you can’t survive on minimum wage alone. I say this from first-hand experience. You are extremely lucky if you don’t have to try to survive on minimum wage.

My final reason for this opinion is that it doesn’t hurt the economy at all. Statistics show that a country with our GDP should have a minimum wage of $12.00/hour. If you wanted to increase your prices to cover the higher, labor costs you won’t have to raise them much since you get more people who can afford what you sell and a slight increase won’t be noticed. Such as switching a good priced at $3.99 to $4.25. In countries with higher minimum wages like Germany or Switzerland, unemployment rates are lower. As you can see it will help not hurt the economy.

In conclusion, you, the future or current president depending on when you read this, should raise the minimum wage. One reason is that it would decrease poverty in the U.S. Another is that people can’t survive off of the current minimum wage. Finally, it would help not hurt our economy. These are my reasons for wanting to increase the minimum wage of the U.S. I hope you agree now and will take my opinion into account in your term or terms of office.

Sincerely,

Andrew Rh.