should the minimum wage be raised from its current $7 25 per hour essay

The current federal minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 per hour, a rate that has not been raised since 2009. Many argue that this rate is not enough to provide a decent standard of living, especially in cities with high costs of living.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 for all workers and $2.13 an hour for tipped workers, and it is cents — literally less than $1 — for workers with disabilities.

In general, increasing the federal minimum wage would raise the earnings and family income of most low-wage workers and thus lift some families out of poverty—but doing so would cause other low-wage workers to become jobless, and their family income would fall.

When adjusting for inflation to today’s standard, the minimum wage is “53.9% higher than today’s $7.25 federal minimum wage” (Should the Federal Minimum Wage Be Increased). The 53.9% difference shows that the minimum wage must be revised as workers suffer from making essentially 3.91 an hour less than they would if inflation was adjusted.

The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 per hour. Many people believe that it should be substantially higher and others believe that increasing it would harm small businesses and the economy.

In January 2021, congressional legislation was proposed to increase the national minimum wage from $7.25 per hour—where it had stood for more than 10 years—to $15 per hour.

Federal law sets a baseline minimum wage of $7.25 an hour for most U.S. workers, but states are free to adopt their own, higher minimums (and in some states, so are cities and counties). With the push to raise the federal minimum wage once again blocked, we wanted to update our previous look at state and local minimum-wage laws.

Over years, the minimum wage has been reviewed upwards amidst increasing cost of living, with the latest proposal seeking to increase the federal minimum wage to $10.10, up from the current $7.25 per hour.

Although the federal minimum wage should be increased from $7.25, the optimal minimum wage should depend on local labor market conditions, cost of living and so on. A flat $15, one-size-fits-all minimum wage applied evenly across the U.S. is potentially bad policy.

In January 2021, legislators introduced the “Raise the Wage Act of 2021,” to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour by 2025. If passed, it would be the first increase in more than a decade, the longest stretch since 1938.