Raising Minimum Wage In America

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America does not have a shortage of money. The U.S. Treasury produces money everyday but where does it all go? People are homeless and starving and working for unfair wages while others are living easily. The one percent sits on top of the struggles of the middle and lower class. We live in the land of equality that does not seem equal. This is not “liberty and justice for all”. There is a solution to this problem; raising the minimum wage (10). It’s such a simple solution that will save generations of Americans to come. In order to demolish poverty in America, lawmakers and legislation need to focus on raising the national minimum wage. If people are living on or below the poverty line, their cycle continues and creates the future generation of lower class citizens who have little chance of climbing up the economic ladder into a more successful lifestyle. The current national minimum wage is America is seven dollars and twenty-five cents per hour of work according to Nick Wang of the Huffington Post. This is an acceptable amount of money for a teenager who wants some cash to spend at the mall. This is not a livable wage for an adult. Working forty hours a week cannot make enough to cover all of the costs of living. In my English class, students tried to make budgets to see if we could survive off of the minimum wage in the town of Braintree. The minimum wage is eight dollars an hour, and I could not survive. My hypothetical apartment cost roughly two-hundred dollars more each month than what I was making each month. I had cut down all other expenses; I was paying for health insurance, groceries, and not much else (1). No one can survive off of so little. In Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed”, one of her maid co-workers trips, falls, and fractures her ankle on the job. Instead of seeking help, she calls her boss and apologizes. She was so desperate for the money she got from her job that she continued to work regardless of the injury. A maid’s work is not easy. It is manual labor (19). She could not survive if she did not get her full pay, so she had to take her boss’s advice and “work through it”. Someone working through intense pain for seven dollars and twenty-five cents indicates that there is a major problem. The money to fix all of the problems is out there. It is sitting in the vaults of the extremely wealthy. The top one percent is holding on to America’s money and they are not spreading it around. An example of a one percenter is the Walton family. The Waltons are famous for their highly successful chain of superstores called Wal-Mart. It is the savior to many households with it’s low priced goods but it is really a company built from corruption and sketchy ethics. According to Ehrenreich during her time working as a Wal-Mart sales associate, the company does not pay overtime to its workers. They are cheated out of money that they earned. If they are working a low wage job, they need every cent they earn. They are paid minimum wage just like any other lower class worker. In fact, “Wal-Mart is the largest employer of low-wage workers in the country” according to the article “Wal-Mart Food Drive Unwittingly Fuels Talk Of Minimum Wage Hike”. That is an immense amount of people working for less than they deserve and they cannot do much to fix it. Workers -like David trying to take down Goliath- have tried to sue Wal-Mart and though some have …show more content…
Instead of money mindlessly being spent at horrid places such as Wal-Mart, America should focus on giving more to worthwhile organizations and causes (18). For starters, money should be going towards raising the national minimum wage. It has already been established that it is impossible to live off of eight dollars which is seventy-five cents more than the national wage. Secondly, money should be going towards improving welfare and other help programs. Peter Edelman of the New York Times states that money is disappearing from helpful programs. This is a serious problem since many of the lower class citizens depend on programs such as welfare and food

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