Minimum wage is gaining lots of attention by policymakers in Washington. The poverty rate in the U.S. is almost 15% with over 47 million Americans living in poverty. Would increasing the minimum wage help to decrease the poverty rate? In this paper my focus is on minimum wage. I am pro minimum wage increase. The minimum wage in Delaware is $8.25/hr. For a regular …show more content…
Some sources believe that many of the people living in poverty are jobless, which means that increasing the minimum wage income would not directly benefit them. However , I disagree with that statement because increasing minimum wage could be used as an incentive to get jobless people to come out and try to get jobs. In Minimum Wages: A Poor Way to Reduce Poverty , Sabia uses the wage increase from $7.25 to $10.10 proposed by President Obama in the 2014 State of the Union as an example. This increase would affect 13% of all people living under the poverty line (Sabia, 2014). As stated before, poverty is particularly prevalent among non-workers. “Yet there are some poor persons who do work, even some who work full-time year-round...Surely, if it increases the minimum wage, it would be for this group”(Vedder and Gallaway, 2001). Full-time year-round workers are still negatively affected by low minimum wage