Let’s shift focus to illegal aliens, since that’s in the news a lot these days. Yep, let’s raise that min. wage to $9. What’s gonna happen is the parking attendants will be fired because the parking company will hire Jose and Pedro (no offense to my Mexican friends here, just illustrating) for $4 or whatever the going rate may be.

So, they get a “raise” and go buy a BRAND NEW car with it? What about getting an education or some sort of training so that they can better themselves? Something tells me that the minimum wage isn’t going to be enough for them. Therein lies the problem with the minimum wage: IT IS NEVER ENOUGH! We can raise it all we want, but people are always going to want more.

People will always want more because there’s this thing called life, simply put. In life, you don’t just have yourself usually, but your spouse and your child (likely children–plural). Put all of that together, and you’re right–minimum wage, be it at $5.15 or $9.00, will never be enough.

Moreover, even if this particular couple is childless, you just imagine trying to balance similar lives and getting a new education. And might I mention that they do have to have a functioning (hopefully safe) car to get to and from work or even to and from a university. Used cars–or should I say good used cards–aren’t always available when you need one, especially according to where you live.

Now add children to the whole equation. Young children will require daycare for this to be pulled off successfully. Children under 16 will only be at school until 3pm; any time after that would be extracurricular, in which case there are usually equipment costs. If you’re living on minimum wage, you likely don’t live in a good neighborhood, unless you’re just lucky. You don’t want your kids there without you. What do you do with them, while you’re trying to balance bills, work and an education? Do you think you could do it all? Some families even have one or both parents working multiple jobs.

This doesn’t even begin to account for single mothers.

Yes, people of lower incomes need to be taught proper and better money management, but are you going to pay for it? Because, guess what, either society will be chipping in for more handout programs or it will be chipping in to teach people how to manage their money. And even then we all know that the latter would not necessarily have a high success rate, because good money management comes more of self-motivation. Otherwise, you wouldn’t see upper middle class people filing for backruptcy, right? A person has to be interested in the responsibility to take it, so the success rate of such education would probably only be about 50 percent, if even that.

Wages should be a factor of supply and demand, not a tool by politicians to get votes. As I have said before: jobs that require little or no skill and can be done by just about anybody do not deserve high wages.

While I agree with you in terms of politics here, you obviously have not thought about how important menial tasks are! Not all things can be done by machine; there are still many, many factory jobs out there that make your life better, whether you realize it or not.

Without them, you likely wouldn’t get as high quality products as you do (inspection by hand), your restaurant tables might be dirty (waiting tables), your plate at a restaurant might have caked food on it (dishwasher), and the list goes on for miles. Yes, these are tasks everyone can perform but tasks that most are not interested in performing or even acknowledging.

Also, define skill and your idea of supply and demand. There are people who work in mechanical situations that many of today’s males could never survive in (considering how many males don’t even know how to change the oil in their cars nowadays), and yet they may only get paid slightly above minimum wage (usually $8-10). They have skills many don’t, and they’re in demand, but they don’t get paid as much. Is that paying someone according to skill, according to demand? And, of course, mechanical situations are not the only scenarios one can use for such an argument.

All this said, I think it would be good if people could get better jobs and have better pay, and not just because of what some politician may decide to do. However, not everyone gets to go to college (even in this day and age). Put bluntly, not everyone is smart/willing enough in high school to get scholarships, either. From those points, it’s hard to move up in the world.

I hate the handout society that I feel America has largely become, and yet there is no clear, 100 percent effective answer as to how we can remove ourselves from it. I agree that consistently raising the minimum wage isn’t the way to go, but I also don’t think people should be bordering starvation or chance being ruined upon their next case of the flu, simply because their pay is so low.

Answers are usually in a grey area.

You seem to not notice that your article is discussing raising the minimum wage for government employees and contractors. This would not be an increase in minimum wage for all jobs. Which means that it does not have as large of an effect on the economy. This is a like an employer deciding to pay all of its employees a certain amount more than the minimum wage… it is apples to oranges… and you cannot effectively argue what is good for applies is also good for oranges.

Then by all means send me a big check and increase my well being, and yours will go up too!