Raising Minimum Wage In The United States

The current federal minimum wage is set at 7.25 dollars per hour. That means for one hour of work, a person earning minimum wage would barely be able to afford a beer in downtown New York. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics there are currently 1.6 million people earning this amount, with another 1.8 million workers earning below the federal minimum (Characteristics 1). That’s 3.4 million people earning 15,080 dollars, and below, annually. This is below the federal poverty line for families of two or more. The issue of raising the federal minimum wage has been in the news recently with President Obama, in his 2014 State of Union address, calling for congress to raise the federal minimum wage from 7.25 dollars an hour to 10.10 dollars …show more content…
This law was meant to keep employers from exploiting their employees but even then it was met with opposition from many employers and others. President Bill Clinton introduced a bill in 1997 that allowed states to enact their own minimum wage rates. As a result of this, there are currently 29 states with a minimum wage above the federal minimum wage. With over 50 percent of states enacting their own, higher, minimum wages this should tell us that the current federal minimum wage is too …show more content…
The most common, and quantitative, way of measuring economic growth is using the GDP (Gross Domestic Product 1). This number provides a monetary value for all of the goods and services produced over a specific time period. The GDP is usually found by adding together a nation’s personal consumption expenditures, which are its payments by households for goods and services, government expenditures, which are its public spending on the provision of goods and services, infrastructure, debt payments, net exports, which are the value of a country’s exports minus the value of imports, and net capital formation, which is the increase in value of a nation’s total stock of monetized capital goods (Costanza 3). Dr. Robert Costanza, Professor and Chair of Public Policy at the Crawford School of Public Policy, claims in "Beyond GDP: The need for new measures of progress" that this measurement is far too simplistic to take into account everything that affects the economy. Costanza argues that many important economic activities are entirely excluded from GDP measurements, “such as volunteer work, social capital formation within healthy family units, the costs of crime and an increasing prison population, and the depletion of natural resources” (Costanza 4). Costanza debates “The world financial system is in crisis, partly as a result of overemphasis on material

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