Should miminum wage be higher?

I think that if the price of minimum wage increases, so will the price of everything else. The more money you pay people, the higher the prices go because the corporation or boss has to make up the loss of money. As stated on 'http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/labor/negative-effects-minimum-wage-laws' stating that: Despite the use of different models to understand the effects of minimum wages, all economists agree that businesses will make changes to adapt to the higher labor costs after a minimum wage increase. Empirical research seeks to determine what changes to variables such as employment and prices firms will make, and how large those changes will be. The higher costs will be passed on to someone in the long run; the only question is who. The important thing for policymakers to remember is that a decision to increase the minimum wage is not cost-free; someone has to pay for it. Evidence of employment loss has been found since the earliest implementation of the minimum wage. The U.S. Department of Labor's own assessment of the first 25-cent minimum wage in 1938 found that it resulted in job losses for 30,000 to 50,000 workers, or 10 to 13 percent of the 300,000 covered workers who previously earned below the new wage floor.²⁰ It is important to note that the limited industries and occupations covered by the 1938 FLSA accounted for only about 20 percent of the 30 million private sector, nonfarm, nonsupervisory, production workers employed in 1938. And of the roughly 6 million workers potentially covered by the law, only about 5 percent earned an hourly rate below the new minimum.²¹

Even though people are being paid more, the bosses of these small business or corporations have to make other drastic changes to keep up with the money lost to be paying workers more. The bosses also need to take into consideration the insurance for themselves, their employees, and their business, the more money you give out, the higher the prices need to go so that you can meet the goals in order to keep a business running.


http://www.cambridge.org/us/download_file/184078/

Solution: Creating an Option for Employers.

If there is an increase in the minimum wage, employers should be able to count their spending on health insurance for their employees — dollar for dollar — against the minimum wage increase. Specifically, all employers should be allowed to count up to $2.10 per hour per worker in health benefits toward meeting the minimum wage level. As a result, employers would not have to reduce health insurance benefits to meet the wage mandate.
This option would allow an employer to substitute a nontaxable benefit for taxable wages. For a person working 2,000 hours per year, a $2.10 increase in nonwage benefits would amount to $4,200, enough to purchase an individual health insurance policy in most places. A couple, both working at the minimum wage, would have $8,400, enough to purchase a family policy in most places.

Not only does it affect the economy this way, it has been said that raising minimum wage would encourage people to drop out of school because pay would be higher, whats the point of getting an education?
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba550


Encourages Teenagers to Drop Out. Some minimum wage advocates argue that teenagers should be in high school or college anyway - not working - and therefore the loss of jobs for young workers is somehow not very harmful. Ironically, though, economic studies have shown that a higher minimum wage entices some teenage students to drop out. With fewer jobs to go around and a greater number of dropouts, some newer dropouts take jobs from the less-educated and lower-productivity teens who had already left school.
Even worse, the failure to find work early in their lives harms young people later in their work lives. For example, economists David Neumark of the Public Policy Institute of California and Olena Nizalova of Michigan State University found that even people in their late 20s worked less and earned less the longer they were exposed to a high minimum wage, presumably because the minimum wage destroyed job opportunities early in their work life.


I'm not for raising minimum wage, if you don't like how much you're making, you either need to find a better job, or you should've done something more with education and had the tools to be given higher amounts of money. You need to have a goal in your life, to be someone that will always have a job, and always be needed. If you do not meet these, you deserve to have minimum wage and if you're not working hard, then you deserve minimum wage also. Harder workers get paid more, if you do something for the company and know how to help in certain ways, you'll be praised more, you're not going to be earning 15.00 an hour, and when someone who knows how to do the job better than you earns the same, now that isn't fair. People work twice as hard as others and don't get their paycheck with more zeros on it, neither should you. Work for your money, and if you're only making minimum wage, you're not doing something right.