Some More On The Minimum Wage
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Social ProgramsHey all. Those few posts on the minimum wage really got me thinking about whether my opinions and ideas were on target or unrealistic.
In my research after the fact, I found a lot of people don’t like a “minimum wage” because they think it doesn’t give people an incentive to work harder. Basically, I found more opinion backed up with a few statistics. Hey, fair enough. But my gut tells me that this country should still have a baseline that grows a very small amount every year so we can demonstrate momentum for those who feel they’re stuck making the same crappy wage for a decade.
And it also seems like a good thing to have a baseline to judge other salaries against. But during my research I found some very interesting stats on minimum wage around the country.
For instance, did you know that the minimum wage in Kansas is $2.65? I certainly didn’t. They also define a work week as being 46 hours. And I work in Kansas! On the opposite end of the spectrum, the minimum wage in San Francisco, CA is $8.50. Sure, San Fran is much more expensive to live in, but if you consider that the federal minimum wage is $5.15 you wonder why there’s SUCH a disparity.
For more information, check out the Department of Labor’s State by State Minimum Wage Page.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 21st, 2005 and is filed under Social Programs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
