Annually, $152.8 billion dollars are spent on welfare and unemployment programs in America, according to the Labor Center at Berkeley University. This staggering number is only likely to grow as the rise of the minimum wage could slash entry level jobs in every corner of America.
The federal minimum wage was raised to $7.25 an hour in 2009 as a final step of a three-part plan issued by the federal congress to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour.
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a bill named the National Industrial Recovery Act, which was ultimately struck down by Congress, mainly because this bill included a dramatic raise in the minimum wage.
It was foreseen that it may kill jobs in a time where people across the country were desperate for work during the Great Depression, when 1-in-4 men in the United States were unemployed and dependent on common, low-level labor jobs, according to North Carolina’s Policy Watch Investigations.
More recently, in the 2013 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama proposed a raise of the federal minimum wage to $9 but was quickly rejected by congress after review from the Congressional Budget Office, due to a projected loss of 500,000 jobs, according to USA Today.
Raising the minimum wage would dramatically increase labor costs for business and with the rise of labor costs, businesses would be forced to provide less jobs for entry level hourly positions.
The increase of labors costs from the raised minimum wage would affect low income families as well as young adults, such as college students, who are looking for work because there would be less jobs for those who have little experience.
A raise in the minimum wage sounds great, but when everyone gets past the few extra dollars they earn, they may look to their side and not see the fellow worker that has been with them for years.
As a college student who struggles to find money to do the things I want to do, I believe that the risks of raising the minimum wage would outweigh the benefits because it could possibly take away my job entirely, rather than giving me a couple cents more on my paycheck.
