Should There Be a Minimum Wage?
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Raising the minimum wage would lift the incomes of millions of working families. For those families, it could mean the difference between groceries and the food bank, or between paying rent and being evicted.
Barack Obama made this argument in his 2013 State of the Union address, saying that raising the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour would “raise the incomes of millions of working families.”
Raising the minimum wage would lift the incomes of millions of working families.
A higher minimum wage can lower incomes instead. Employers who can’t afford the higher wage have to let some workers go, and those workers then make less than before ($0), not more.
Employers who can’t afford the higher wage have to let some workers go
Employers could pay for the higher wage by cutting executive pay instead of jobs. Many companies pay their CEOs millions, so the money to pay workers more is there, and laying workers off is a choice, not a necessity.
This argument rests on the implicit idea that CEOs ‘steal’ value from their employees. That isn’t the case. Theft means taking someone’s property without consent. Employees instead voluntarily enter employment because they value the wages more than whatever else they have considered doing with their time instead.