Raising minimum wage

Personally, I think raising the minimum wage is a bad idea. Even though it seems like people are making more money, in reality people will lose jobs so the companies don't go out of business. Many people think that raising the minimum wage will decrease poverty. A major reason why the minimum wage is not really an anti-poverty tool is that raising the minimum wage will cause businesses to reduce the number of workers they hire and the hours they ask their employees to work. According to Neumark et al :"The answer we obtain to the question of whether minimum wage increases reduce the proportion of poor and low-income families is a fairly resounding "no." The evidence on both family income distributions and changes in incomes experienced by families indicates that minimum wages raise the incomes of some poor families, but that their net effect is to increase the portion of families that are poor and near-poor." Another reason the minimum wage won't do anything is that most people that get minimum wage aren't in poverty. Also going back to people losing jobs, teenagers will take the place of adults because they will work for less because they don't need to support a family. According to Forbes, nothing will change for the highly skilled workers, the middle class workers will be ok, and the low class workers will be the ones losing jobs.









http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2007/01/raising-the-minimum-wage-will-not-reduce-poverty

http://www.balancedpolitics.org/minimum_wage.htm

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/02/20/why-shouldnt-we-increase-the-minimum-wage-to-20hour/