The typical minimum wage earner is a provider and a breadwinner - most likely a woman - responsible for paying bills, running a household and raising children.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Raising the minimum wage represents a substantial financial burden for employers, particularly start-ups, early stage companies, and family-owned businesses. In response, business owners would be forced to either lay off workers or raise prices to offset the rise in labor costs.
When we talk about the kind of folks whose lives will be made better by raising the minimum wage, we're not talking about a couple teenagers earning extra spending money to supplement their allowance. We're talking about providers and breadwinners. Working Americans with bills to pay and mouths to feed.
Full-time workers earning the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 only earn about $14,500 a year in wages - below the poverty line for a family of two. That's unacceptable.
When I started in the business, the minimum wage was $1.25. I've seen an enormous number of wage increases. Basically, it applies evenly to everyone in the business.
At the current $5.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage has become a poverty wage. A full-time worker with one child lives below the official poverty line.
The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high.
The first job I ever had was at a pool-liner-manufacturing plant. Minimum wage was $4.25, and that's what I was making. It was this huge, hot, un-air-conditioned factory staffed with all women and me. This is in Georgia, during the summertime, so it was pretty ridiculous.
The minimum wage is something that F.D.R. put in place a long time ago during the Great Depression. I don't think it worked then. It didn't solve any problems then and it hasn't solved any problems in 50 years.
In the general economy, you get government involved in making market decisions - first of all, they're going to get it wrong. For a minimum wage, you will actually reduce the number of jobs available.
The minimum wage is not something that you want to stay on as a permanent basis. For example, if you have a minimum wage job, you don't stay there 20 or 30 years. You don't put your children through college working on minimum wage.
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