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Minimum Wage Raise is the Least We Can Do to Civilize America

Tue, 09/04/2012 - 20:12 — Dave Culver
Section(s): 
Economics
Labor

  • Raising the minimum wage doesn’t cut into profits; it also increases demand in the economy by moving income to workers who spend more than those who receive profit.  The Economic Policy Institute estimated that the proposed increase in the minimum wage would actually increase employment.
  • How raising the federal minimum wage would help working families and give the economy a boost

Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Submited by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Lydia Howell

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(August 30, 2012) The federal minimum wage is just $7.25 an hour and hasn’t been raised in three years.  But a raise is much more overdue than that.  If we look at the minimum wage 44 years ago, and simply adjust it for inflation, it would be more than $10 today.

This is another ugly symptom of what has gone wrong in America over the past 35-40 years.  From 1979-2007 about 60 percent of the income gains have gone to the now infamous 1 percent at the top, with the majority of those gains going to the top 0.1 percent – people who made, on average, $5.6 million per year.

Full story...

Related:

How raising the federal minimum wage would help working families and give the economy a boost, Doug Hall and David Cooper, Economic Policy Institute
(August 14, 2012) Over the past year, increasing attention has focused on the prevalence and growth of income inequality in the United States. While soaring incomes at the top of the income distribution have played a large role in these trends (Mishel and Sabadish 2012), so too has the failure to ensure that lower-income workers earn a fair wage.

The minimum wage is a disgrace, Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown

  • Raising it would be a boon to the whole economy.
  • More than 100 million Americans live on less than a minimal family budget.


 

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