The Minimum Wage should be increased.

I will play by the rule. DEFINITIONS MINIMUM WAGE: an amount of money that is the least amount of money per hour that workers must be paid according to the law ... www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/... INCREASE:to make greater, as in number, size, strength, or quality; augment; add to: toincrease taxes. verb (used without object), ... dictionary.reference.com/../increase ARGUMENTS . Increase Minimum Wage, Decrease Employment Getting the millions of currently-unemployed workers into productive employment should be a major focus of government. I had hoped that the president would address the labor market crisis, directing the energy of government in an effort to help the suffering unemployed. Unfortunately, there was precious little attention and no urgency regarding this crisis in the State of the Union address. Instead, the president called to increase the minimum wage. The economic effects of minimum wage increases have been studied dozens and dozens of times in the past few decades. Different studies come to different conclusions, of course. But economists David Neumark and William Wascher, after conducting an exhaustive literature review, conclude that "among the papers we view as providing the most credible evidence, almost all point to negative employment e"0"2ects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries."They continue: "The studies that focus on the least-skilled groups that are likely most directly a"0"2ected by minimum wage increases provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups." The weight of the evidence suggests that increasing the minimum wage decreases employment, especially for lower-skilled workers. Will a minimum wage increase help to alleviate poverty, as the president suggested in his speech? The evidence suggests that it will not. Economists Joseph Sabia and Richard Burkhauser find that asmall minority of workers who would benefit from a minimum wage increase - around ten percent - live in poor households. The White House itself states that workerswho would benefit from a minimum wage increase bring home less than half of their household's total wage and salary income. In other words, the workers who will benefit from an increase are secondary and tertiary earners - think more of teenagers with summer jobs, of spouses earning some income on the side, or of elderly grandparents earning some retirement income, and less of primary breadwinners. In fact, Professors Sabia and Burkhauser find that around two-thirds of minimum wage workers live in households with incomes more than twice the poverty line.Speaking of teenagers: The unemployment rate for 16-to-19 year old African Americans is a massive 37.8 percent. For white teenagers, the rate is 20.8 percent. This crushing unemployment will ripple through the rest of their lives, affecting their labor market outcomes for years to come. Why does it make sense to increase the cost of hiring these unemployed teenagers by increasing the minimum wage? Raising the minimum wage is unlikely to affect the poverty rate. And raising the minimum wage certainly won'tincreasethe number of workers who are employed. Quite the opposite - the weight of the evidence suggests that it may decrease the number of employed workers. Our labor market crisis is a national emergency. Ideally our government would be implementing policies to help workers get jobs. But surely the government should not actively increase the cost of hiring workers. An increase in the minimum wage would do exactly that - by design. The president was wrong to call for a minimum wage increase, most especially in a labor market in crisis. Raising minimum wage is sure bet to create more jobless young Americans The unemploymentrate for 16 to 19 year olds was an astonishingly high 23.8 percent last month. The United States is facing a youth employment crisis. Young workers are finding it increasingly difficult to enter the labor market, get their first job and work their way up the career ladder. Yet, during this time of persistently high youth unemployment, there have been calls to increase the minimum wage from $7.25 to as high as $10 per hour. America's youth are having a hard time reaching the first rung on their career ladders. Now is a bad time to increase minimum wages and make that important step more difficult. Higher minimum wages generate a tradeoff between higher wages for the employed and higher rates of unemployment. When minimum wages increase, many workers who earn less than the new higher minimum wage lose their jobs. Firms often decide that they can get by with fewer workers instead of paying higher wages. The increase in minimum wage, will even increase the unemployment issue in the state. www.aei.org/article/economics/fisca.. www.forbes.com/sites/williamdunkelb...