Top 5 Reasons Why Raising the Minimum Wage Is Good for You and Me

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/top-5-reasons-why-raising-minimum-wage-good-you-and-me



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1. Good for Families : According to economist James Galbraith , raising the minimum wage would raise the incomes of 28 million Americans. Women would particularly benefit because they tend to work for lower wages than men. As Galbraith sees it, raising the minimum wage is family friendly policy:

“With more family income, some people would choose to retire, go back to school, or have children, making it easier for others who need jobs to find them. Working families would have more time for community life, including politics; Americans would start to reclaim the middle-class political organization that they once had. Because payroll- and income-tax revenues would rise, the federal deficit would come down. Social Security worries would fade.”

2. Good for Economic Recovery : To get the economy back on track, spending power has to be in the hands of those who actually spend in the real economy. That means regular people, not the super-wealthy who tend to hoard wealth or invest in financial products. The minimum wage story is not just a story about income inequality, but rather it’s about an elite that has hijacked the economic system and made it work less productively than before while redistributing more of what is working to themselves.

3. Helps People Get Out of Debt : During the early part of the post-war period, particularly the 1950s and 1960s, entrepreneurship was more concerned with building productive capacity and putting workers to work actually making useful things as opposed to creating financial Frankenstein products like credit default swaps.

[Scuba]

1. The poor must not be given too much or they will lose their incentive to work.

The wealthy must be given everything or they will lose their incentive to work.

[Sirveri]

2. No, the best way is a high top marginal tax rate. It accomplishes the same thing.

You can combine a tax hike with a minimum wage to focus the effects of the minimum wage increase.

Tax hike disables the rich from extracting all of the wealth from their companies. If they perform such an option that wealth is captured by the government and can be redistributed to the rest of us as greater services. With all the new found money in those companies they can then either: pay their employees more (or give greater benefits), engage in facility upgrades (increased domestic spending hopefully), give it to the government, or reduce prices (effectively raising everyone elses wages and purchasing power).