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<\/center>So the minimum wage hike, which was stuffed into a war appropriations bill and not debated on its own, has taken effect. The hike goes from $5.15 to $5.85, with an additional 70 cents each year for the next two years. The minimum wage will then me $7.25\/hour. This hike, however, hurts more people than it supposedly helps.<\/p>\nFirst off, according to the US Department of Labor’s own statistics,<\/a> “about 1 percent of workers age 25 and over earned the minimum wage or less.” These are typically entry level jobs, folks.<\/p>\n Rather than rehash this whole argument though, as I’m sure there are plenty of political blogs doing it, I’m going to bring up another point: everybody else is getting a 70 cent per hour pay cut. That might not matter quite as much if you’re making $20\/hr. What if you’re making $5.85? You just got slammed back to ground zero. What if you had worked a retail job for two years to work your way up to $6\/hour or so? Now some 16 year old kid can get hired for just about the same salary you’ve strived for two years to attain. Feels great, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n You can’t give the entire working population of the United States a mandatory pay raise without the cost of goods and services following. It may not be overnight, like the wage hike…in fact, businesses may have been ramping up in order to compensate for the day the wage hike goes into effect. They’ll likely continue to do so for the next two years, since the minimum wage will continue to climb until it has made a 41% jump in two years! How much do you think your Big Mac is going to cost in 2009?<\/p>\n If you don’t make the minimum wage, guess what: your wages didn’t change a bit today. Well, that’s not entirely true…technically, they went down. When the cost of the things you buy goes up but your salary does not, then you just got a pay cut. All that so 2.2% of the 76.5 million hourly wage earners in the US<\/a> (that’s 1.7 million out of 300 million) can get a pay raise that will be offset by rising costs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So the minimum wage hike, which was stuffed into a war appropriations bill and not debated on its own, has taken effect. The hike goes from $5.15 to $5.85, with an additional 70 cents each year for the next two … Continue reading