# data[].attributes.body
This article is with the topic and says yes it should be raised. This article says by raising the minimum wage to $15 it will eliminate poverty by 2025

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Summary

The Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would help eliminate poverty-level wages by raising the national minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025. This report finds that the raise is long overdue and would deliver broad benefits to workers and the economy.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour and has not been raised in over 10 years. A full-time federal minimum wage worker today earns 18% less than what her counterpart earned at the time of the last increase, after adjusting for rising costs of living ($15,080 annually in 2021 versus $18,458 in 2009).

In 1968, a minimum wage worker earned $10.59 per hour in inflation-adjusted terms, 46% more than today's $7.25 federal minimum wage. The minimum wage today would be over $22 per hour had it tracked productivity increases over the last five decades.

The Raise the Wage Act of 2021, which phases in a $15 minimum wage by 2025, would raise the earnings of 32 million workers, or 21% of the workforce. Affected workers include those who would see their wages rise as the new minimum wage rate exceeds their current hourly pay and those who have a wage rate just above the new minimum wage who would receive a raise as employer pay scales are adjusted upward to reflect the new minimum wage.

On average, an affected worker who works year round would see an annual pay increase of about $3,300. In total, a $15 minimum wage would provide over $108 billion in additional wages in 2025 to affected workers.

A national minimum wage of $15 delivers on a core demand of the Civil Rights movement. The March on Washington in 1963 (the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom) demanded a $2.00 national minimum wage that would be equivalent to $15.00 today, after adjusting for inflation.

Earnings would rise for nearly one in three Black workers (31%) and for one in four Hispanic workers (26%), compared with about one in five white workers. For Black and Hispanic workers who work year round, annual pay would increase by at least $3,500.

$15 minimum wage by 2025 would raise the wages of at least 19 million essential and front-line workers. Essential and front-line workers constitute more than 60% of all workers who would see a pay increase.

Workers who cannot work from home-who are more likely to be Black, Latinx, and Native American-are the overwhelming majority of workers (almost nine out of every 10) who would receive pay raises under the Raise the Wage Act of 2021.

The Raise the Wage Act would help eliminate poverty wages. Raising the minimum wage to $15 in 2025 would lift up to 3.7 million-including an estimated 1.3 million children-out of poverty.

Raising the minimum wage to $15 would help ensure that more low-wage workers are paid enough to cover basic living expenses, i.e., a wage providing a modest yet adequate standard of living. As of 2021, in virtually all urban and rural areas of the country, a single adult without children working full time must earn more than $15 per hour to have enough to pay for housing and other basic living expenses. For individuals with children, year-round work at a $15 wage in 2025 will still be inadequate to achieve basic economic security.

Minimum wage increases have not led to significant job losses. Despite claims that raising the minimum wage would reduce job opportunities for vulnerable groups of workers, the best evidence shows little to no job losses in the wake of minimum wage increases and a net wage gain even if job losses have occurred. These benefits explain why surveys show that the people most likely to support a minimum wage increase are unemployed people, people of color, and women.

Minimum wage increases affect adults in their career-building years who are helping to support their families-with women disproportionately benefiting from a pay boost. The average age of workers who would see a pay increase under the Raise the Wage Act is 35 years old. About 90% of those with increased wages would be adults age 20 or older. Most of the workers who would benefit are women (59%) even though men are a majority of the workforce. More than half of those who would have higher pay work full time (59%). Past research shows that these workers are often the primary earners for their families, producing the majority of their family's total income.

Data by state and congressional district
Supplemental tables showing characteristics of workers who would be affected by increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 in each state and in the District of Columbia are available here.

Data by congressional district are viewable in an interactive map (EPI 2021b).

An increase in the national minimum wage is well overdue

The federal minimum wage has not been raised in over a decade; it has remained stuck at $7.25 per hour since 2009. Figure A compares the trajectory of the minimum wage at face value (known in economics as the nominal minimum wage) with the inflation-adjusted or "real" value of the minimum wage (representing its purchasing power) and with the real value of the minimum wage had it risen with productivity after 1948. As the figure shows, rising costs of living since the last increase in the nominal minimum wage in 2009 have diminished the purchasing power of the federal minimum wage (the middle line for most of the graph), which had declined by 17% as of 2020 and 18% as of 2021 (not shown), a devastating fall in the earnings of the lowest-wage workers.

The figure also shows that, with the exception of some important increases, the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage has mostly stagnated or declined since the 1970s. But that was not always the case: In the 1950s and 1960s, Congress raised the minimum wage more frequently such that it rose roughly in line with the pace of economywide productivity. At the peak purchasing power of the minimum wage in 1968, a minimum wage worker earned $10.59 per hour (in 2021 dollars), 46% more than a worker at the $7.25 federal minimum wage today. Had Congress continued to increase the minimum wage in line with productivity growth, the minimum wage today would be over $22 per hour. Despite the doubling of labor productivity, minimum wage workers today are paid substantially less in real terms than their counterparts earned five decades ago.

Raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025, as called for in the Raise the Wage Act of 2021, is an important step toward reversing the erosion of the minimum wage's buying power and-as detailed later in this report-achieving greater racial and gender pay equity, as well as fairer wages for those workers most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The act has three key components:

1. The national minimum wage increases in five steps over five years, beginning with an increase to $9.50 this year and ending with a $15 minimum wage in 2025.

2. Each year after 2025, the minimum wage would automatically increase in line with changes in the median hourly wage in the economy.

3. The subminimum wages employers are currently allowed to pay tipped workers, workers with disabilities, and workers under the age of 20 are gradually phased out, raising minimum wages for these workers to the same level as other workers.

These three components of the Raise the Wage Act would ensure that the lowest paid workers are sharing in the productivity gains of the economy. A level of $15 in 2025 would finally raise the living standards of the lowest-wage workers above levels those workers experienced 50 years ago. Automatically increasing or indexing the minimum wage to the median wage guarantees regular and predictable raises and prevents growing pay inequality between the lowest paid workers and the middle class. Finally, by phasing out subminimum wages, such as the meager $2.13 per hour wage for tipped workers, all workers would be paid at least the new, common federal floor. Tipped workers in particular would benefit from having a regular paycheck so that they would not need to rely exclusively on volatile tips that can be particularly susceptible to discrimination and wage theft (Lynn et al. 2008; Cooper and Kroeger 2017). 1

In 2025, the Raise the Wage Act would raise the wages of 32.2 million workers ( Figure B). Those affected workers represent 21% of the projected workforce of 151.7 million in 2025. Affected workers include 22.1 million directly affected workers who would otherwise earn less than $15 per hour in 2025 and 10.1 million indirectly affected workers who would otherwise earn just above $15 per hour in 2025. Specifically, we define indirectly affected workers as those with a wage rate between the new minimum wage and 115% of the new minimum wage. These workers will receive a pay boost as employers raise wages to recruit and retain them under the new higher wage standard. On average, an affected low-wage worker who works year round would see an annual pay increase of more than $3,300 (see Appendix Table 2).

As we describe below, a $15 minimum wage by 2025 would disproportionately benefit Black and Hispanic workers and women, raise the pay of essential and front-line workers, and reduce the number of people living in poverty. The appendix contains additional projections of benefits by detailed demographic groups and a summary of the methodology used to create these estimates.

An increase in the national minimum wage supports a more racially just economy

Due to occupational segregation, discrimination, and other impacts of systemic racism, racial pay disparities are one of the persistent, structural features of the U.S. labor market (Wilson and Rodgers 2016). Despite some historical progress, in 2019 Hispanic workers were being paid 10.8% less than white workers with similar ages and education levels, and Black workers were being paid 14.9% less than comparable white workers (Gould 2020).

Our analysis of shares of workers affected, combined with recent research on minimum wages and racial income and earnings gaps, indicates that raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would substantially reduce racial pay inequality. Figure C shows that while the raise would increase wages for less than one out of five (18.4%) white workers, about one in three (31.3%) Black workers and one in four (26.0%) Hispanic workers would receive a pay increase. Because they are particularly underpaid, women of color would disproportionately benefit from the Raise the Wage Act: 22.9% of those who would receive pay increases are Black or Hispanic women.

Ending the separate, tipped wage would especially benefit women of color, as they are more likely to work in tipped jobs and be paid subminimum wages. The National Women's Law Center (2021) finds that nearly 70% of tipped workers are women, and that Latinas and Black, Native American, and Asian American/Pacific Islander women are all disproportionately represented among tipped workers.

Civil rights leaders and advocates have long recognized the value of higher wage standards in reducing inequality. In 1963, the federal minimum wage was $1.15 an hour, and there was no minimum wage at all for agriculture, nursing homes, restaurants, and other service industries that disproportionately employed Black workers. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (the March on Washington) called for a $2.00 minimum wage (Pitts and Allegretto 2013). As Derenoncourt (2020) has observed, the 1963 March on Washington's demand would be equivalent to about $15.00 today after adjusting for inflation (see Figure D).

The 1963 March on Washington demanded a $2.00 minimum wage that would "include all areas of employment which are presently excluded" and would "give all Americans a decent standard of living" (Derenoncourt 2020).

Several years later, Congress expanded the coverage of the minimum wage and eventually raised it to its historical high point of $1.60 in 1968, or $10.59 in 2021 dollars. Derenoncourt and Montialoux (2021) describe how the new standard raised wages overall but had its largest effects on Black workers. Just before the increase, 28.8% of Black workers earned at or below the 1967 minimum, compared with 13.9% of white workers. The authors convincingly demonstrate that these increases were responsible for more than 20% of the fall in the Black-white earnings gap during the Civil Rights Era. Since then, minimum wages have continued to play a substantial role in reducing racial earnings inequality. Wursten and Reich (2021) found that minimum wage increases between 1990 and 2019 reduced Black-white wage gaps by 12% overall, and by 60% for workers with only a high school diploma or less. The link between increases in the minimum wage and decreases in racial earnings gaps also means that the erosion of the federal minimum wage over this period increased racial earnings gaps.

Essential and front-line workers constitute a majority of those who would see pay raises by raising the minimum wage to $15

During the COVID-19 pandemic, essential and front-line workers have kept the economy running at great risk to their health and their families. The U.S. labor market, however, has not fairly rewarded that vital work. Very few essential workers receive hazard pay to compensate for their now-more dangerous work, and low pay among essential and front-line workers continues to be pervasive (Dorman and Mishel 2020; McNicholas and Poydock 2020, Table 3). Kinder and Stateler (2021) found that in 2018, essential workers made up nearly half (22.3 million) of the 47.7 million U.S. workers in occupations in which the median wage was less than $15 per hour. In our analysis, we find that a majority of workers who would benefit from the Raise the Wage Act are essential or front-line workers.

Definitions of essential workers vary because the U.S. has no single uniform guidance and because it is difficult to map a given set of job characteristics to coarse data on occupations. Nevertheless, using a variety of different occupation-based definitions we consistently find that most of the workers who would see a pay increase due to the Raise the Wage Act are essential or front-line workers.

Table 1 shows the projected total workforce in 2025 and affected workers under the Raise the Wage Act. The first row summarizes findings already discussed in this report: 32.2 million of 151.7 million workers would receive a direct or indirect pay increase in 2025 if the minimum wage were raised to $15 per hour. In the second row, we consider "critical infrastructure" occupations defined by the Labor Market Information Institute (LMI Institute 2020), where "infrastructure" includes a broad set of workers covering a majority of the workforce, including those in energy, health care, law enforcement, telecommunications, and other occupations. The institute's count of essential workers includes Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) codes established by federal statistical agencies for the industries and job descriptions that the Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency considers "essential critical infrastructure workers."

About 22.0 million critical infrastructure workers would receive pay increases due to the Raise the Wage Act, and they constitute about 68.3% of the total number of all affected workers. In other words, more than two-thirds of those who would benefit from a $15 minimum wage in 2025 are critical infrastructure workers.

We also look at essential and front-line work from another angle, considering occupations in which workers cannot do their jobs remotely by working from home. In the third and fourth rows of Table 1 we analyze workers who can't telework using two different definitions. The first definition comes from a classification by Dingel and Neiman (2020) based on pre-pandemic survey information. The second definition comes from our classification based on Current Population Survey data collected during the pandemic, specifically the employment share of occupations that were not teleworking during the months of May through December 2021.

Under these definitions of essential and front-line work, the number of workers affected by raising the minimum wage grows. That is because workers in both the cannot-telework categories are paid less on average than workers in the critical infrastructure category. The Raise the Wage Act would benefit between 28.0 million and 28.2 million workers who cannot work from home-constituting between 87.1% and 87.6% of the total affected workforce. Other EPI research has found that Black, Latinx, and Native American workers are the least likely to be in jobs that allow them to work from home (Wilson 2020).

Even when we restrict our analysis to workers in both critical infrastructure and nontelework occupations, we find a significant impact. 2 The Raise the Wage Act would lift the pay of between 19.4 million and 19.9 million such workers, or roughly six out of 10 of all affected workers.

Regardless of the specific definition, it is clear that tens of millions of essential and front-line workers are underpaid and would benefit from a much higher minimum wage.

Poverty would decrease and economic security would increase under a $15 minimum wage

The five-decade decline and stagnation of the minimum wage has prevented millions of people, often children, from maintaining an adequate standard of living. Notably among minimum wage workers struggling to get by are those whose incomes are so low they fall under the federal poverty threshold.

Poverty reduction

From its origins, the minimum wage has been an important policy tool in the fight against poverty. The Fair Labor Standards Act was enacted in 1938 "to protect this Nation from the evils and dangers resulting from wages too low to buy the bare necessities of life." 3 Thirty years later, higher wages were one of five key demands of the Economic Bill of Rights of the 1968 Poor People's Campaign (Johnson 2018).

Unfortunately, infrequent and inadequate increases in the national minimum have reduced it to a poverty wage. Figure E shows that a full-time minimum wage worker in 1968 would have earned roughly $22,000 a year (in 2021 dollars), but today their counterpart could earn only about $15,000 working full time. As a consequence, a single parent working full time would be in poverty if they earned the federal minimum wage and had no other source of income.

In 2019, about 29.1 million children and nonelderly adults lived in poverty (Semega et al. 2020). By raising wages for some full-time workers above their respective poverty threshold, the Raise the Wage Act would play a meaningful role in reducing the extent of hardship among low-wage workers and their families.

A $15 minimum wage by 2025 would reduce the number of people living in poverty by up to 3.7 million (see Figure F). To calculate this poverty reduction, we apply poverty reduction estimates from Dube (2019b) to the average minimum wage increase expected under the Raise the Wage Act. Dube finds that a 10% increase in the minimum wage reduces nonelderly poverty by somewhere between 2% and 4%. After accounting for already scheduled state and local minimum wage increases, we find that the Raise the Wage Act would raise the average, effective minimum wage across the United States by 30% in 2025, thus reducing the number of nonelderly people in poverty by between 6% and 12%, or roughly 1.8 million to 3.7 million people. If we assume the age distribution of poverty reduction is similar to the actual poverty distribution, the Raise the Wage Act would raise 1.3 million children out of poverty. 4

Providing wages adequate to cover the most basic family budget

A broader look at the needs of families reinforces the necessity of a substantial increase in the minimum wage. One well-known downside of the "official" poverty measures is that they are an incomplete measure of economic security for families. As a result, EPI has designed Family Budget thresholds to estimate area-specific incomes needed to cover basic expenses like housing, food, transportation, health care, taxes, and other necessities (Gould, Mokhiber, and Bryant 2018; EPI 2018). 5

By any reasonable standard, the Family Budget thresholds are very conservative. For example, they do not account for savings of any kind, such as for emergencies or retirement, or for any entertainment-they are simple calculations of what it takes to cover basic necessities on a month-to-month basis. Yet to meet their Family Budget thresholds, today, in all but two of the 3,000+ counties in the U.S.-both urban and rural-a single adult without children must earn more than $15 per hour and work full-time, all year long (see Figure G). 6

Rising costs of living imply that, in 2025, workers all across the country will need even more to support themselves and their families. In the average rural area of Alabama or Mississippi, a single adult without children will need to work full time and earn at least $18.50 per hour in 2025. In cities like Chicago, Miami, and Phoenix, a single adult will need even more-at least $20 per hour in 2025. 7 In some cities, like New York and San Francisco, that number will approach-or exceed-$30 per hour. And of course when a family includes children, the wage needed to just afford the basics increases dramatically.

A $15 minimum wage would advance gender justice

In addition to the disproportionate impact that it would have for workers of color and those in essential and front-line jobs, raising the federal minimum wage would broadly benefit women workers. As shown in Table 2, a $15 minimum wage in 2025 would provide a pay raise to nearly 19 million women-roughly one in four women workers in the United States. Women make up nearly 60% of all those who would benefit from the policy.

A $15 minimum wage would benefit adults in their career-building years who help support their families

There is sometimes a perception that the workers who would benefit from a higher minimum wage are mostly teenagers in their first jobs. In fact, the data show that most of the workers who would benefit from a federal increase to $15 are older and full-time workers. Past research shows that many of these workers are likely supporting families (Cooper 2019). Table 2 shows that only 10% of affected workers are teenagers while 65.8% are 25 years old or older. The average age of affected workers is 35 years old. Fifty-nine percent of affected workers work 35 hours per week or more, and more than a quarter have children. In fact, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 would provide a raise to nearly one in three working single parents.

Table 2 also shows that the majority of workers who would receive a raise come from families with limited means. Nearly 57% of affected workers are in families with total annual incomes less than $50,000. For these families, every additional dollar they receive has a meaningful impact on their ability to make ends meet. (More detailed demographic statistics are available in Appendix Table 3.)

A $15 minimum wage in 2025 would benefit the economy

The immediate benefits of a minimum wage increase are in the earnings boost for the lowest-paid workers, but increasing the minimum wage to $9.50 this year and the increases thereafter would deliver broader benefits to the economy, particularly now. The economy is still reeling from the stunning collapse of economic activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Extra dollars in the pockets of millions of working families would help by boosting aggregate demand. Economists generally recognize that low-wage workers are more likely than any other income group to spend any extra earnings immediately on previously unaffordable basic needs or services. Indeed, research by Cooper, Luengo-Prado, and Parker (2019) finds that minimum wage increases are associated with higher consumer spending, particularly in places with higher concentrations of low-wage workers.

The perennial concern raised about minimum wage increases is their effects on the employment of low-wage workers. By raising the cost of labor, do minimum wage increases cause businesses to employ significantly fewer workers, threatening the incomes of the low-wage workforce overall? The answer from empirical research on previous minimum wage increases is a clear "no." In his comprehensive review of minimum wage research, Dube (2019a) concludes that "the overall body of evidence suggests a rather muted effect of minimum wages to date on employment" and "the weight of the evidence suggests any job losses are quite small." For every 10% change in the average wage of low-wage workers, the median employment effect across studies was essentially zero.

Some of these studies and more recent research show that there have been little to no employment losses for even the highest minimum wages enacted at state or local levels. Cengiz et al. (2019) found that both the typical minimum wage increases and also the highest state-level minimum wage increase significantly raised wages without reducing the employment of low-wage workers. Derenoncourt and Montialoux (2021) demonstrated that highest national minimum wage we've had-in 1968, the equivalent of $10.59 per hour in 2021 dollars-also raised wages and significantly reduced Black-white earnings inequality without employment losses. Using data from low-wage counties, where minimum wage increases have raised labor costs much more than in high-wage labor markets, Godoey and Reich (2021) found that the policies significantly reduced poverty and had essentially no employment impact. Dube and Lindner (2021) found that 21 city-level minimum wage increases raised wages in those cities with little effect on the number of low-wage jobs.

Economists typically measure how "high" a new minimum wage is by where it would cut into the existing wage distribution. One such measure is the ratio of the minimum-to-median wage, with the median of course representing the worker at the very middle of the wage distribution. The $15 minimum wage in 2025 under the Raise the Wage Act would be 66.8%, or approximately two-thirds, of the projected national median wage. 8 Dube and Lindner (2021) and Godoey and Reich (2021) found little employment impacts from minimum wage increases, even though the counties and cities they studied had minimum-to-median wage ratios of up to roughly 80%.

Another measure of the "bite" of the minimum wage is the share of the workforce affected by the policy. According to this statistic, the highwater 1968 national minimum wage is remarkably similar to the Raise the Wage Act. Estimates from Derenoncourt and Montialoux (2021) suggest that the 1968 policy directly affected an estimated 16.1% of the overall workforce and 28.8% of Black workers. 9 Above we estimate similar shares for a $15 minimum wage in 2025: 14.5% of all workers and 23.2% of Black workers would be directly affected. Given that the 1968 policy raised the incomes of the low-wage workforce without substantial job loss, we should feel confident that a phased-in $15 minimum wage in 2025 would do the same.

Despite such evidence, some still may maintain that concerns about job losses are warranted. To put these concerns in perspective, consider the predictions of CBO (2021), which estimated that a $15 minimum wage by 2025 would reduce low-wage employment by about 1.4 million. There are three reasons why this estimate is overstated. First, that particular employment reduction estimate is not well supported by the best research or even the typical minimum wage study; in Dube (2019a), the median estimate of the own-wage elasticity was -0.04, less than one-tenth the size of the employment response. Second, because CBO (2021) also estimated that a $15 minimum wage in 2025 would raise the earnings of 27 million workers, even accepting at face value the job loss estimate implies that about 95% of the low-wage workforce would benefit from the policy. Third, the focus on job loss gives the misleading impression that the policy would cause many workers to have no income over the course of a year; but because of the high degree of churn in the low-wage labor market, what is measured as job losses will actually be low-wage workers spending more time in between jobs, but earning more when they do work (Cooper, Mishel, and Zipperer 2018).

Minimum wage increases are extremely popular. Moreover, the highest approval of minimum wage increases comes from those groups who critics say are most likely to suffer job losses. An analysis of the 2016 American National Election Survey by Aaron Sojourner estimates that more than seven in 10 unemployed workers approved of raising the minimum wage (Sojourner 2021). Figure H also shows that the unemployed favor raising the minimum wage by an 11 percentage-point margin over those already employed. A stronger preference for minimum wage increases holds for other demographic groups who face greater obstacles in the labor market. Black and Hispanic adults are significantly more likely to approve of minimum wage increases than white adults. Women approve of minimum wage increases significantly more than men, with similar approval margins between those without and with a college degree.

Even with these margins, most demographic groups overwhelmingly approve of minimum wage increases. In fact, voters have approved every one of 22 state-level minimum wage increases on the ballot over the last two decades. 10

Conclusion

Currently, about four in 10 workers in the United States live in a state where minimum wages are eventually scheduled to rise to $15 per hour. 11 Yet without a stronger federal standard, most low-wage workers in this country will continue to experience the hardships and indignity of low pay.

The Raise the Wage Act charts the path forward to where we, as a society, should target a minimum wage in 2025. Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would secure a long-overdue improvement in living standards for the lowest-wage workers and will finally help ensure that full-time work is a means to escape poverty. The policy would significantly reduce long-standing race- and gender-based pay inequities and the inequities between how tipped and nontipped workers are treated. Finally, by automatically linking future increases to median wage growth, it will prevent those with the lowest pay from slipping behind.

Endnotes

1. Cooper and Kroeger (2017) explain how the tipped minimum wage is supposed to work and the problems with it: "In most states and under federal law, employers of workers who customarily receive tips-such as restaurant servers and nail salon attendants-may credit workers' tips against their required minimum wage. For example, federal law allows employers to pay tipped workers as little as $2.13 per hour, provided that the employees' tips over the course of a week raise their effective hourly pay to at least the minimum wage. If the tips are inadequate, employers are required to make up the difference. Unfortunately, policing this requirement is largely left to the tipped workers themselves, who would need to carefully track their weekly hours and tips to know if employers were paying an adequate base wage. Moreover, the FLSA and most state tipped wage laws do not specify the period over which weekly tips are supposed to be calculated, nor do they specify how employers are to treat secondary tipping-when tipped workers share a portion of their tips with support staff....The opaqueness of tipped wage laws leaves most tipped workers with little knowledge of their rights and particularly open to abuse."

2. The combination of critical infrastructure jobs and nontelework jobs is similar to approaches used by Blau, Koebe, and Meyerhofer (2020) and Goodnough and Hoffman (2020).

3. S. Rep. No. 75-884, at 4 (1937).

4. Using already scheduled state and local minimum wage increases, we estimate the employment-weighted minimum wage (with no change in the federal minimum) will be $11.53 in 2025. We apply the 0.263 log point increase to $15 to the range of long-run poverty rate elasticities in Table 7 of Dube (2019b), or -0.220 to -0.459, and to the nonelderly poverty rates in Table B-1 of U.S. Census Bureau 2020, which estimated that of 270.1 million children and nonelderly adults, 29.1 million lived in poverty, of which 35.9% were under the age of 18.

5. Gould, Cooke, and Kimball (2015) observe that "official" poverty rate methodology was designed in 1963 and has only been adjusted to account for overall inflation, and they contrast poverty thresholds and Family Budget thresholds.

6. After adjusting the 2017$ values in the Family Budget Calculator to 2021$, only Lucas County, Ohio ($14.80), .and Cameron County, Texas ($14.96), have family budget thresholds below $15 an hour for a single adult without children. We can expect that the Family Budget thresholds for both counties will exceed a $15 hourly equivalent by 2022.

7. Chicago (Cook County, $20.42), Miami (Miami-Dade County, $20.63), Phoenix (Maricopa County, $20.80).

8. The median hourly wage in 2019 was $19.33, and it would be $22.46 in 2025 assuming 0.5% real wage growth on top of CBO's (2021) CPI-U inflation projections.

9. Specifically, Derenoncourt and Montialoux (2021) estimated that, in the year prior to the 1968 increase, 16.1% of the overall workforce and 28.8% of Black workers would be directly affected by the new policy.

10. There have been 27 state-level ballot initiatives since 1996, and only two failed in that year. See Ballotpedia (2021).

11. Economic Policy Institute calculation using Current Employment Statistics data from the Bureau of Labor statistics. Values calculated using the listed states' share of total U.S. nonfarm employment in calendar year 2019 (prior to the COVID-19 pandemic). For recent minimum wage changes, see the Economic Policy Institute Minimum Wage Tracker, https://www.epi.org/minimum-wage-tracker/.

References

American National Elections Studies. 2019. "2016 Times Series Study." September 4, 2019 version. Accessed at https://electionstudies.org/data-center/2016-time-series-study/.

Ballotpedia. 2021. " Minimum Wage on the Ballot " (web page). Accessed February 15, 2021.

Blau, Francine D., Josefine Koebe, and Pamela A. Meyerhofer. 2020. " Who are the Essential and Frontline Workers? " NBER Working Paper 27791, September 2020.

Cengiz, Doruk, Arindrajit Dube, Attila Lindner, and Ben Zipperer. 2019. " The Effect of Minimum Wages on Low-Wage Jobs." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 134, no. 3, August 2019.

Congressional Budget Office (CBO). 2020. Budget and Economic Data: 10-Year Economic Projections. July 2020.

Congressional Budget Office (CBO). 2021. The Budgetary Effects of the Raise the Wage Act of 2021. February 2021.

Cooper, Daniel, María José Luengo-Prado, and Jonathan A. Parker. 2019. " The Local Aggregate Effects of Minimum Wage Increases." Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 52 (December 2019), 5-35.

Cooper, David. 2019. Raising the Federal Minimum Wage to $15 by 2024 Would Lift Pay for Nearly 40 Million Workers. Economic Policy Institute, February 2019.

Cooper, David, and Teresa Kroeger. 2017. Employers Steal Billions from Workers' Paychecks Each Year. Economic Policy Institute, May 2017.

Cooper, David, Lawrence Mishel, and Ben Zipperer. 2018. Bold Increases in the Minimum Wage Should be Evaluated for the Benefits of Raising Low-Wage Workers' Total Earnings. Economic Policy Institute, April 2018.

Cooper, David, Zane Mokhiber, and Ben Zipperer. 2019. Minimum Wage Simulation Model Technical Methodology. Economic Policy Institute, February 2019.

Derenoncourt, Ellora. 2020. " Just calculated the inflation-adjusted nat'l MW demanded by the March on Washington in August 1963 ($2/hr)." Twitter, @EDerenoncourt, July 23, 2020, 3:42 p.m.

Derenoncourt, Ellora, and Claire Montialoux. 2021. " Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality." Quarterly Journal of Economics 136, no. 1, February.

Dingel, Jonathan I., and Brent Neiman. 2020. " How Many Jobs Can Be Done at Home?" Journal of Public Economics 189, September 2020.

Dorman, Peter, and Lawrence Mishel. 2020. A Majority of Workers are Fearful of Coronavirus Infections at Work, Especially Black, Hispanic, and Low- and Middle-Income Workers. Economic Policy Institute, June 16, 2020.

Dube, Arindrajit. 2019a. Impacts of Minimum Wages: Review of the International Evidence. Report prepared for Her Majesty's Treasury (UK). November 2019.

Dube, Arindrajit. 2019b. " Minimum Wages and the Distribution of Family Incomes." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 11, no. 4: 268-304.

Dube, Arindrajit, and Attila Lindner. 2021. " City Limits: What Do Local-Area Minimum Wages Do?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 35, no. 1, Winter 2021.

Economic Policy Institute (EPI). 2018. Family Budget Calculator (interactive tool). Last updated March 2018.

Economic Policy Institute (EPI). 2021a. Current Population Survey Extracts, Version 1.0.13, https://microdata.epi.org.

Economic Policy Institute (EPI). 2021b. " The Impact of Raising the Minimum Wage to $15 by 2025, by Congressional District: Mapping the Impact of the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 on Workers " (interactive map). Accessed January 28, 2021.

Godoey, Anna, and Michael Reich. 2021. " Are Minimum Wage Effects Greater in Low-Wage Areas?" Industrial Relations, January 2021.

Goodnough, Abby, and Jan Hoffman. 2020. " The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First?" New York Times, December 5, 2020.

Gould, Elise. 2020. State of Working America Wages 2019: A Story of Slow, Uneven, and Unequal Wage Growth over the Last 40 Years, Economic Policy Institute, February 2020.

Gould, Elise, Tanyell Cooke, and Will Kimball. 2015. What Families Need to Get By: EPI's 2015 Family Budget Calculator. Economic Policy Institute, August 2015.

Gould, Elise, Zane Mokhiber, and Kathleen Bryant. 2018. The Economic Policy Institute's Family Budget Calculator: Technical Documentation. Economic Policy Institute, March 2018.

Johnson, Charles. 2018. " A Reflection: The Poor People's Campaign and Dr. King's Economic Vision." Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, April 27, 2018.

Kinder, Molly, and Laura Stateler. 2021. " Essential Workers Comprise About Half of All Workers in Low-Paid Occupations. They Deserve a $15 Minimum Wage." The Avenue, The Brookings Institution, February 5, 2021.

Labor Market Information Institute (LMI Institute). 2020. " Many U.S. Workers in Critical Occupations in the Fight Against COVID-19." Database, Version April 3, 2020. Accessed February 2021.

Lynn, M., M. Sturman, C. Ganley, E. Adams, M. Douglas, and J. McNeil. 2008. "Consumer Racial Discrimination in Tipping: A Replication and Extension." Journal of Applied Social Psychology 38, 1045-1060. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2008.00338.x.

McNicholas, Celine, and Margaret Poydock. 2020. " Who Are Essential Workers? A Comprehensive Look at Their Wages, Demographics, and Unionization Rates." Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), May 19, 2020.

National Women's Law Center. 2021. One Fair Wage: Women Fare Better in States with Equal Treatment for Tipped Workers. National Women's Law Center, February 2021.

Pitts, Steven C., and Sylvia Allegretto. 2013. To Work with Dignity: The Unfinished March Toward a Decent Minimum Wage. Economic Policy Institute, August 2013.

Raise the Wage Act of 2021, S. 53, 117th Cong. (2021).

Semega, Jessica, Melissa Kollar, Emily A. Shrider, and John F. Creamer. 2020. Income and Poverty in the United States: 2019. U.S. Census Bureau, September.

Sojourner, Aaron. 2021. " Most-recent data I found is ANES after 2016 election. 78% of unemployed jobseekers in the U.S. favored raising the minimum wage." Twitter, @aaronsojourner, February 6, 2021, 12:08 p.m.

Wilson, Valerie. 2020. " Inequities Exposed: How COVID-19 Widened Racial Inequities in Education, Health, and the Workforce." Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, June 22, 2020.

Wilson, Valerie, and William M. Rodgers III. 2016. Black-White Wage Gaps Expand with Rising Wage Inequality. Economic Policy Institute, September 2016.

Wursten, Jesse, and Michael Reich. 2021. " Racial Inequality and Minimum Wages in Frictional Labor Markets." IRLE Working Paper 101-21, February.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would lift the pay of 32 million workers: A demographic breakdown of affected workers and the impact on poverty, wages, and inequality

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Summary The Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would help eliminate poverty-level wages by raising the national minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025. This report finds that the raise is long overdue and would deliver broad benefits to workers and the economy. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour and has...

# data[].attributes.body
Pro and con --> pro: The establishment of a right to health care in the United States might reduce the cost of health care in the country.
con: A right to health care might raise the debt and deficit in the United States.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Proponents say it would stop medical bankruptcies and improve public health. Opponents say it is socialism and should be an individual’s responsibility.

# data[].attributes.headline
yes, the minimum wage should be raised. 

# data[].attributes.subject
yes, the minimum wage should be raised. 

# data[].attributes.body
with the world still recording from covid, there are low labor rates especially in the food industry because the minimum wage just isn't worth it. raising the minimum wage will also raise labor rates.

-Emilie.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As the U.S. economy begins to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been widespread reporting of ongoing labor shortages, especially in lower-wage industries, such as food service, that were hard hit by the crisis. In a previous Kenan Insight, we pointed to several factors that are potentially contributing to the current labor imbalance, including ongoing public health concerns, caregiving responsibilities and additional unemployment benefits.

Of the many discussions being held in Washington and beyond about potential policy prescriptions, one long-standing debate has returned to the forefront: should the federal government increase the minimum wage, which hasn't changed in a decade?

Some economists argue that now, more than ever, the federal government should increase the federal minimum wage, believing that higher wages will entice more workers to return. However, others contend that raising the minimum wage could have unintended consequences for workers and businesses, especially small- and medium-sized businesses still reeling from the pandemic. ¹

The Past and Present of the Federal Minimum Wage in the United States

History of Federal Minimum Wage Rates

Source: U.S. Department of Labor

The concept of a minimum wage began in Europe in the mid-19th century, making its way across the Atlantic in the early 20th century. ² U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt championed the minimum wage as a way to support laborers who suffered during the Great Depression, ultimately signing the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA). ³ Among other things, the legislation codified a federal minimum wage of $0.25 per hour, with the purpose of creating "a minimum standard of living to protect the health and well-being of employees." ⁴ However, it did not stipulate an automatic cost-of-living adjustment; rather, it required an act of Congress to make such an adjustment.

Since its inception, the federal minimum wage has been increased 22 times. The most recent boost, in 2007, implemented a three-year phased increase to $7.25 per hour, where the minimum wage remains today. 5,6 States and municipalities can institute their own minimum wage above the federal requirement. To date, 30 states and Washington, D.C. have minimum wages above the federal requirement, with 18 of them including automatic adjustments to respond to inflation. ⁷ Additionally, cities like Seattle are implementing their own minimum wages above even state requirements. ⁸

This past January, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 (H.R., 603 S.53) was introduced in both the U.S. House and Senate. The act proposes to increase the minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour by 2025, and institute automatic raises to keep pace with median wages. ⁹ Introduction of this legislation, along with support from the Biden administration, has renewed the national debate about the goals, costs and role of the government in setting a minimum wage. ¹⁰

From Minimum Wage to Living Wage

Change in Employment in an Average Week

Change in the Number of People in Poverty

Instituting a minimum wage is a mechanism by which to address poverty. However, as it stands today, the federal minimum wage does not provide many workers with a living wage, defined as the income needed to cover basic essentials such as food, childcare, housing, health insurance and transportation. Estimates of this living wage vary depending on geography (e.g., New York City versus Indianapolis). According to the Living Wage Calculator, a tool developed by researchers at MIT, the living wage in the United States in 2019 was $68,808 per year before taxes for a family of four (two working adults and two children). ¹¹ To reach this combined annual income, each adult would have to work 75 hours per week - essentially two full-time jobs - if employed at the current federal minimum wage. A single mother with two children earning the federal minimum wage would need to work 138 hours per week, essentially 24 hours a day for six days.

There is a stark difference between the federal minimum wage and a living wage. As a wealthy country, the United States has the capacity to support poor working Americans. Raising the minimum wage is one policy tool that can be used to help increase the wealth of families and individuals in financial need. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that if the Raise the Minimum Wage Act were implemented, 900,000 Americans would be lifted out of poverty by 2025. 12,13 It also estimates the act would provide wage increases for 27 million Americans, or 15% of the labor force, and an increase in total payroll of $509 billion over the first 10 years. Additionally, a National Bureau of Economics working paper finds positive effects of an increased minimum wage on incomes for those at the bottom of the income distribution. ¹⁴

Spillover Effects of a Federal Minimum Wage Increase

So it seems simple: Raise the minimum wage and help workers out of poverty. Unfortunately, it's not so straightforward. The challenge is that instituting a minimum wage includes tradeoffs. An across-the-board increase of the federal minimum wage will also come with negative spillovers that may affect some of the most vulnerable Americans. The CBO report also estimates that the proposed increase in the minimum wage could cause 1.4 million Americans to lose their jobs. Although this loss may seem modest compared to the number of people a minimum wage would help, it's important to account for the intensity of the benefits that accrue to the winners (i.e., those who receive higher wages) and those that accrue to the losers (i.e., those who lose their employment).

Although few economists argue against a minimum wage, the debate in the literature centers around the elasticity of wage floors on employment. In other words, how many jobs are lost for each dollar increase in the minimum wage? A review article summarizing the modern literature on minimum wage concluded that 78.9% of academic studies find negative effects of the minimum wage on employment, while 54% of studies show a negative and statistically significant effect on employment. ¹⁵

Even in the absence of outright job losses, a higher minimum wage can still negatively impact some workers. For example, an increase in the minimum wage can lead to a decrease in the overall hours of low-wage workers, counteracting some of the gains from a higher wage. ¹⁶ In addition, a higher minimum wage may be passed along to consumers, leading to higher prices for certain goods and services, such as childcare and eldercare. ¹⁷ From a policy perspective, understanding these tradeoffs is critical to calculating a minimum wage that helps lift people out of poverty while mitigating the negative spillovers.

Raise the Minimum Wage but Embrace Geographic Differences

Ultimately, the federal minimum wage should be increased and keep pace with inflation changes. But given the potential for negative spillovers, policy implementation needs to maximize gains and minimize costs, especially to the most vulnerable Americans. 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. The impacts and outcomes of an across-the-board approach on a high-wage state such as Connecticut, where the median annual wage is $49,000, will be different than those experienced by a low-wage state such as Mississippi, with a median wage of $30,000 per year. If a $15 minimum wage is right for Connecticut, then it is wrong for Mississippi and vice versa.

Some argue that the federal minimum wage amount should be the floor, and that states or counties should have the authority to set higher rates based on their own market conditions. However, this assumes that the local political process is such that all local markets that should have a higher minimum wage will act accordingly, which is not necessarily the case. Setting a federal minimum wage that takes local markets into consideration will allow for greater equities in wage opportunities across states and counties. Additionally, instituting automated updates to the minimum wage dependent on other market conditions, such as inflation, will ensure these wage consistencies remain over time.

Policy Levers to Lift Americans out of Poverty

Addressing poverty in America is critically important. With the goal of having all workers earn a living wage, an increase to the minimum wage is just one policy lever Washington can pull. Other measures Congress and the Biden administration have already begun to employ include the child tax credit, which will provide much needed financial support to families, especially for costs like childcare. Additional levers that would support the poor, but are more politically charged, include the negative income tax and universal basic income, which come with their own tradeoffs. As the United States struggles with post-pandemic labor shortages, it is giving workers, especially lower-wage workers who were often on the front lines during the pandemic, the floor to bargain for additional protections. Now policymakers have to decide how they'll respond.

¹³ It is worth noting, however, that the CBO most likely underestimated the number of Americans that would be lifted out of poverty, since the CBO assumed that the GDP would remain unchanged. It is widely argued that an increase in the federal minimum wage will increase GDP which would further increase the overall number of Americans that would be lifted out of poverty due to positive spillover effects.

¹⁴ Dube, A. (2018). Minimum Wages and the Distribution of Family Incomes. NBER. https://doi.org/10.3386/w25240; Cengiz, D., Dube, A., Lindner, A., & Zipperer, B. (2019). The Effect of Minimum Wages on Low-Wage Jobs: Evidence from the United States Using a Bunching Estimator. NBER. https://doi.org/10.3386/w25434

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As the U.S. economy begins to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and businesses grapple with ongoing labor shortages, the debate around increasing the federal minimum wage - which hasn't budged in over a decade - has returned to the fore.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.epi.org/publication/raising-the-federal-minimum-wage-to-15-by-2025-would-lift-the-pay-of-32-million-workers/

Pro
Raising the minimum wage would overall benefit everyone. The minimum wage hasn’t been increased in over 10 years. The Raise the Wage Act will increase the wages of 21% of workers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Summary

The Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would help eliminate poverty-level wages by raising the national minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025. This report finds that the raise is long overdue and would deliver broad benefits to workers and the economy.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour and has not been raised in over 10 years. A full-time federal minimum wage worker today earns 18% less than what her counterpart earned at the time of the last increase, after adjusting for rising costs of living ($15,080 annually in 2021 versus $18,458 in 2009).

In 1968, a minimum wage worker earned $10.59 per hour in inflation-adjusted terms, 46% more than today's $7.25 federal minimum wage. The minimum wage today would be over $22 per hour had it tracked productivity increases over the last five decades.

The Raise the Wage Act of 2021, which phases in a $15 minimum wage by 2025, would raise the earnings of 32 million workers, or 21% of the workforce. Affected workers include those who would see their wages rise as the new minimum wage rate exceeds their current hourly pay and those who have a wage rate just above the new minimum wage who would receive a raise as employer pay scales are adjusted upward to reflect the new minimum wage.

On average, an affected worker who works year round would see an annual pay increase of about $3,300. In total, a $15 minimum wage would provide over $108 billion in additional wages in 2025 to affected workers.

A national minimum wage of $15 delivers on a core demand of the Civil Rights movement. The March on Washington in 1963 (the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom) demanded a $2.00 national minimum wage that would be equivalent to $15.00 today, after adjusting for inflation.

Earnings would rise for nearly one in three Black workers (31%) and for one in four Hispanic workers (26%), compared with about one in five white workers. For Black and Hispanic workers who work year round, annual pay would increase by at least $3,500.

$15 minimum wage by 2025 would raise the wages of at least 19 million essential and front-line workers. Essential and front-line workers constitute more than 60% of all workers who would see a pay increase.

Workers who cannot work from home-who are more likely to be Black, Latinx, and Native American-are the overwhelming majority of workers (almost nine out of every 10) who would receive pay raises under the Raise the Wage Act of 2021.

The Raise the Wage Act would help eliminate poverty wages. Raising the minimum wage to $15 in 2025 would lift up to 3.7 million-including an estimated 1.3 million children-out of poverty.

Raising the minimum wage to $15 would help ensure that more low-wage workers are paid enough to cover basic living expenses, i.e., a wage providing a modest yet adequate standard of living. As of 2021, in virtually all urban and rural areas of the country, a single adult without children working full time must earn more than $15 per hour to have enough to pay for housing and other basic living expenses. For individuals with children, year-round work at a $15 wage in 2025 will still be inadequate to achieve basic economic security.

Minimum wage increases have not led to significant job losses. Despite claims that raising the minimum wage would reduce job opportunities for vulnerable groups of workers, the best evidence shows little to no job losses in the wake of minimum wage increases and a net wage gain even if job losses have occurred. These benefits explain why surveys show that the people most likely to support a minimum wage increase are unemployed people, people of color, and women.

Minimum wage increases affect adults in their career-building years who are helping to support their families-with women disproportionately benefiting from a pay boost. The average age of workers who would see a pay increase under the Raise the Wage Act is 35 years old. About 90% of those with increased wages would be adults age 20 or older. Most of the workers who would benefit are women (59%) even though men are a majority of the workforce. More than half of those who would have higher pay work full time (59%). Past research shows that these workers are often the primary earners for their families, producing the majority of their family's total income.

Data by state and congressional district
Supplemental tables showing characteristics of workers who would be affected by increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 in each state and in the District of Columbia are available here.

Data by congressional district are viewable in an interactive map (EPI 2021b).

An increase in the national minimum wage is well overdue

The federal minimum wage has not been raised in over a decade; it has remained stuck at $7.25 per hour since 2009. Figure A compares the trajectory of the minimum wage at face value (known in economics as the nominal minimum wage) with the inflation-adjusted or "real" value of the minimum wage (representing its purchasing power) and with the real value of the minimum wage had it risen with productivity after 1948. As the figure shows, rising costs of living since the last increase in the nominal minimum wage in 2009 have diminished the purchasing power of the federal minimum wage (the middle line for most of the graph), which had declined by 17% as of 2020 and 18% as of 2021 (not shown), a devastating fall in the earnings of the lowest-wage workers.

The figure also shows that, with the exception of some important increases, the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage has mostly stagnated or declined since the 1970s. But that was not always the case: In the 1950s and 1960s, Congress raised the minimum wage more frequently such that it rose roughly in line with the pace of economywide productivity. At the peak purchasing power of the minimum wage in 1968, a minimum wage worker earned $10.59 per hour (in 2021 dollars), 46% more than a worker at the $7.25 federal minimum wage today. Had Congress continued to increase the minimum wage in line with productivity growth, the minimum wage today would be over $22 per hour. Despite the doubling of labor productivity, minimum wage workers today are paid substantially less in real terms than their counterparts earned five decades ago.

Raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025, as called for in the Raise the Wage Act of 2021, is an important step toward reversing the erosion of the minimum wage's buying power and-as detailed later in this report-achieving greater racial and gender pay equity, as well as fairer wages for those workers most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The act has three key components:

1. The national minimum wage increases in five steps over five years, beginning with an increase to $9.50 this year and ending with a $15 minimum wage in 2025.

2. Each year after 2025, the minimum wage would automatically increase in line with changes in the median hourly wage in the economy.

3. The subminimum wages employers are currently allowed to pay tipped workers, workers with disabilities, and workers under the age of 20 are gradually phased out, raising minimum wages for these workers to the same level as other workers.

These three components of the Raise the Wage Act would ensure that the lowest paid workers are sharing in the productivity gains of the economy. A level of $15 in 2025 would finally raise the living standards of the lowest-wage workers above levels those workers experienced 50 years ago. Automatically increasing or indexing the minimum wage to the median wage guarantees regular and predictable raises and prevents growing pay inequality between the lowest paid workers and the middle class. Finally, by phasing out subminimum wages, such as the meager $2.13 per hour wage for tipped workers, all workers would be paid at least the new, common federal floor. Tipped workers in particular would benefit from having a regular paycheck so that they would not need to rely exclusively on volatile tips that can be particularly susceptible to discrimination and wage theft (Lynn et al. 2008; Cooper and Kroeger 2017). 1

In 2025, the Raise the Wage Act would raise the wages of 32.2 million workers ( Figure B). Those affected workers represent 21% of the projected workforce of 151.7 million in 2025. Affected workers include 22.1 million directly affected workers who would otherwise earn less than $15 per hour in 2025 and 10.1 million indirectly affected workers who would otherwise earn just above $15 per hour in 2025. Specifically, we define indirectly affected workers as those with a wage rate between the new minimum wage and 115% of the new minimum wage. These workers will receive a pay boost as employers raise wages to recruit and retain them under the new higher wage standard. On average, an affected low-wage worker who works year round would see an annual pay increase of more than $3,300 (see Appendix Table 2).

As we describe below, a $15 minimum wage by 2025 would disproportionately benefit Black and Hispanic workers and women, raise the pay of essential and front-line workers, and reduce the number of people living in poverty. The appendix contains additional projections of benefits by detailed demographic groups and a summary of the methodology used to create these estimates.

An increase in the national minimum wage supports a more racially just economy

Due to occupational segregation, discrimination, and other impacts of systemic racism, racial pay disparities are one of the persistent, structural features of the U.S. labor market (Wilson and Rodgers 2016). Despite some historical progress, in 2019 Hispanic workers were being paid 10.8% less than white workers with similar ages and education levels, and Black workers were being paid 14.9% less than comparable white workers (Gould 2020).

Our analysis of shares of workers affected, combined with recent research on minimum wages and racial income and earnings gaps, indicates that raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would substantially reduce racial pay inequality. Figure C shows that while the raise would increase wages for less than one out of five (18.4%) white workers, about one in three (31.3%) Black workers and one in four (26.0%) Hispanic workers would receive a pay increase. Because they are particularly underpaid, women of color would disproportionately benefit from the Raise the Wage Act: 22.9% of those who would receive pay increases are Black or Hispanic women.

Ending the separate, tipped wage would especially benefit women of color, as they are more likely to work in tipped jobs and be paid subminimum wages. The National Women's Law Center (2021) finds that nearly 70% of tipped workers are women, and that Latinas and Black, Native American, and Asian American/Pacific Islander women are all disproportionately represented among tipped workers.

Civil rights leaders and advocates have long recognized the value of higher wage standards in reducing inequality. In 1963, the federal minimum wage was $1.15 an hour, and there was no minimum wage at all for agriculture, nursing homes, restaurants, and other service industries that disproportionately employed Black workers. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (the March on Washington) called for a $2.00 minimum wage (Pitts and Allegretto 2013). As Derenoncourt (2020) has observed, the 1963 March on Washington's demand would be equivalent to about $15.00 today after adjusting for inflation (see Figure D).

The 1963 March on Washington demanded a $2.00 minimum wage that would "include all areas of employment which are presently excluded" and would "give all Americans a decent standard of living" (Derenoncourt 2020).

Several years later, Congress expanded the coverage of the minimum wage and eventually raised it to its historical high point of $1.60 in 1968, or $10.59 in 2021 dollars. Derenoncourt and Montialoux (2021) describe how the new standard raised wages overall but had its largest effects on Black workers. Just before the increase, 28.8% of Black workers earned at or below the 1967 minimum, compared with 13.9% of white workers. The authors convincingly demonstrate that these increases were responsible for more than 20% of the fall in the Black-white earnings gap during the Civil Rights Era. Since then, minimum wages have continued to play a substantial role in reducing racial earnings inequality. Wursten and Reich (2021) found that minimum wage increases between 1990 and 2019 reduced Black-white wage gaps by 12% overall, and by 60% for workers with only a high school diploma or less. The link between increases in the minimum wage and decreases in racial earnings gaps also means that the erosion of the federal minimum wage over this period increased racial earnings gaps.

Essential and front-line workers constitute a majority of those who would see pay raises by raising the minimum wage to $15

During the COVID-19 pandemic, essential and front-line workers have kept the economy running at great risk to their health and their families. The U.S. labor market, however, has not fairly rewarded that vital work. Very few essential workers receive hazard pay to compensate for their now-more dangerous work, and low pay among essential and front-line workers continues to be pervasive (Dorman and Mishel 2020; McNicholas and Poydock 2020, Table 3). Kinder and Stateler (2021) found that in 2018, essential workers made up nearly half (22.3 million) of the 47.7 million U.S. workers in occupations in which the median wage was less than $15 per hour. In our analysis, we find that a majority of workers who would benefit from the Raise the Wage Act are essential or front-line workers.

Definitions of essential workers vary because the U.S. has no single uniform guidance and because it is difficult to map a given set of job characteristics to coarse data on occupations. Nevertheless, using a variety of different occupation-based definitions we consistently find that most of the workers who would see a pay increase due to the Raise the Wage Act are essential or front-line workers.

Table 1 shows the projected total workforce in 2025 and affected workers under the Raise the Wage Act. The first row summarizes findings already discussed in this report: 32.2 million of 151.7 million workers would receive a direct or indirect pay increase in 2025 if the minimum wage were raised to $15 per hour. In the second row, we consider "critical infrastructure" occupations defined by the Labor Market Information Institute (LMI Institute 2020), where "infrastructure" includes a broad set of workers covering a majority of the workforce, including those in energy, health care, law enforcement, telecommunications, and other occupations. The institute's count of essential workers includes Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) codes established by federal statistical agencies for the industries and job descriptions that the Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency considers "essential critical infrastructure workers."

About 22.0 million critical infrastructure workers would receive pay increases due to the Raise the Wage Act, and they constitute about 68.3% of the total number of all affected workers. In other words, more than two-thirds of those who would benefit from a $15 minimum wage in 2025 are critical infrastructure workers.

We also look at essential and front-line work from another angle, considering occupations in which workers cannot do their jobs remotely by working from home. In the third and fourth rows of Table 1 we analyze workers who can't telework using two different definitions. The first definition comes from a classification by Dingel and Neiman (2020) based on pre-pandemic survey information. The second definition comes from our classification based on Current Population Survey data collected during the pandemic, specifically the employment share of occupations that were not teleworking during the months of May through December 2021.

Under these definitions of essential and front-line work, the number of workers affected by raising the minimum wage grows. That is because workers in both the cannot-telework categories are paid less on average than workers in the critical infrastructure category. The Raise the Wage Act would benefit between 28.0 million and 28.2 million workers who cannot work from home-constituting between 87.1% and 87.6% of the total affected workforce. Other EPI research has found that Black, Latinx, and Native American workers are the least likely to be in jobs that allow them to work from home (Wilson 2020).

Even when we restrict our analysis to workers in both critical infrastructure and nontelework occupations, we find a significant impact. 2 The Raise the Wage Act would lift the pay of between 19.4 million and 19.9 million such workers, or roughly six out of 10 of all affected workers.

Regardless of the specific definition, it is clear that tens of millions of essential and front-line workers are underpaid and would benefit from a much higher minimum wage.

Poverty would decrease and economic security would increase under a $15 minimum wage

The five-decade decline and stagnation of the minimum wage has prevented millions of people, often children, from maintaining an adequate standard of living. Notably among minimum wage workers struggling to get by are those whose incomes are so low they fall under the federal poverty threshold.

Poverty reduction

From its origins, the minimum wage has been an important policy tool in the fight against poverty. The Fair Labor Standards Act was enacted in 1938 "to protect this Nation from the evils and dangers resulting from wages too low to buy the bare necessities of life." 3 Thirty years later, higher wages were one of five key demands of the Economic Bill of Rights of the 1968 Poor People's Campaign (Johnson 2018).

Unfortunately, infrequent and inadequate increases in the national minimum have reduced it to a poverty wage. Figure E shows that a full-time minimum wage worker in 1968 would have earned roughly $22,000 a year (in 2021 dollars), but today their counterpart could earn only about $15,000 working full time. As a consequence, a single parent working full time would be in poverty if they earned the federal minimum wage and had no other source of income.

In 2019, about 29.1 million children and nonelderly adults lived in poverty (Semega et al. 2020). By raising wages for some full-time workers above their respective poverty threshold, the Raise the Wage Act would play a meaningful role in reducing the extent of hardship among low-wage workers and their families.

A $15 minimum wage by 2025 would reduce the number of people living in poverty by up to 3.7 million (see Figure F). To calculate this poverty reduction, we apply poverty reduction estimates from Dube (2019b) to the average minimum wage increase expected under the Raise the Wage Act. Dube finds that a 10% increase in the minimum wage reduces nonelderly poverty by somewhere between 2% and 4%. After accounting for already scheduled state and local minimum wage increases, we find that the Raise the Wage Act would raise the average, effective minimum wage across the United States by 30% in 2025, thus reducing the number of nonelderly people in poverty by between 6% and 12%, or roughly 1.8 million to 3.7 million people. If we assume the age distribution of poverty reduction is similar to the actual poverty distribution, the Raise the Wage Act would raise 1.3 million children out of poverty. 4

Providing wages adequate to cover the most basic family budget

A broader look at the needs of families reinforces the necessity of a substantial increase in the minimum wage. One well-known downside of the "official" poverty measures is that they are an incomplete measure of economic security for families. As a result, EPI has designed Family Budget thresholds to estimate area-specific incomes needed to cover basic expenses like housing, food, transportation, health care, taxes, and other necessities (Gould, Mokhiber, and Bryant 2018; EPI 2018). 5

By any reasonable standard, the Family Budget thresholds are very conservative. For example, they do not account for savings of any kind, such as for emergencies or retirement, or for any entertainment-they are simple calculations of what it takes to cover basic necessities on a month-to-month basis. Yet to meet their Family Budget thresholds, today, in all but two of the 3,000+ counties in the U.S.-both urban and rural-a single adult without children must earn more than $15 per hour and work full-time, all year long (see Figure G). 6

Rising costs of living imply that, in 2025, workers all across the country will need even more to support themselves and their families. In the average rural area of Alabama or Mississippi, a single adult without children will need to work full time and earn at least $18.50 per hour in 2025. In cities like Chicago, Miami, and Phoenix, a single adult will need even more-at least $20 per hour in 2025. 7 In some cities, like New York and San Francisco, that number will approach-or exceed-$30 per hour. And of course when a family includes children, the wage needed to just afford the basics increases dramatically.

A $15 minimum wage would advance gender justice

In addition to the disproportionate impact that it would have for workers of color and those in essential and front-line jobs, raising the federal minimum wage would broadly benefit women workers. As shown in Table 2, a $15 minimum wage in 2025 would provide a pay raise to nearly 19 million women-roughly one in four women workers in the United States. Women make up nearly 60% of all those who would benefit from the policy.

A $15 minimum wage would benefit adults in their career-building years who help support their families

There is sometimes a perception that the workers who would benefit from a higher minimum wage are mostly teenagers in their first jobs. In fact, the data show that most of the workers who would benefit from a federal increase to $15 are older and full-time workers. Past research shows that many of these workers are likely supporting families (Cooper 2019). Table 2 shows that only 10% of affected workers are teenagers while 65.8% are 25 years old or older. The average age of affected workers is 35 years old. Fifty-nine percent of affected workers work 35 hours per week or more, and more than a quarter have children. In fact, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 would provide a raise to nearly one in three working single parents.

Table 2 also shows that the majority of workers who would receive a raise come from families with limited means. Nearly 57% of affected workers are in families with total annual incomes less than $50,000. For these families, every additional dollar they receive has a meaningful impact on their ability to make ends meet. (More detailed demographic statistics are available in Appendix Table 3.)

A $15 minimum wage in 2025 would benefit the economy

The immediate benefits of a minimum wage increase are in the earnings boost for the lowest-paid workers, but increasing the minimum wage to $9.50 this year and the increases thereafter would deliver broader benefits to the economy, particularly now. The economy is still reeling from the stunning collapse of economic activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Extra dollars in the pockets of millions of working families would help by boosting aggregate demand. Economists generally recognize that low-wage workers are more likely than any other income group to spend any extra earnings immediately on previously unaffordable basic needs or services. Indeed, research by Cooper, Luengo-Prado, and Parker (2019) finds that minimum wage increases are associated with higher consumer spending, particularly in places with higher concentrations of low-wage workers.

The perennial concern raised about minimum wage increases is their effects on the employment of low-wage workers. By raising the cost of labor, do minimum wage increases cause businesses to employ significantly fewer workers, threatening the incomes of the low-wage workforce overall? The answer from empirical research on previous minimum wage increases is a clear "no." In his comprehensive review of minimum wage research, Dube (2019a) concludes that "the overall body of evidence suggests a rather muted effect of minimum wages to date on employment" and "the weight of the evidence suggests any job losses are quite small." For every 10% change in the average wage of low-wage workers, the median employment effect across studies was essentially zero.

Some of these studies and more recent research show that there have been little to no employment losses for even the highest minimum wages enacted at state or local levels. Cengiz et al. (2019) found that both the typical minimum wage increases and also the highest state-level minimum wage increase significantly raised wages without reducing the employment of low-wage workers. Derenoncourt and Montialoux (2021) demonstrated that highest national minimum wage we've had-in 1968, the equivalent of $10.59 per hour in 2021 dollars-also raised wages and significantly reduced Black-white earnings inequality without employment losses. Using data from low-wage counties, where minimum wage increases have raised labor costs much more than in high-wage labor markets, Godoey and Reich (2021) found that the policies significantly reduced poverty and had essentially no employment impact. Dube and Lindner (2021) found that 21 city-level minimum wage increases raised wages in those cities with little effect on the number of low-wage jobs.

Economists typically measure how "high" a new minimum wage is by where it would cut into the existing wage distribution. One such measure is the ratio of the minimum-to-median wage, with the median of course representing the worker at the very middle of the wage distribution. The $15 minimum wage in 2025 under the Raise the Wage Act would be 66.8%, or approximately two-thirds, of the projected national median wage. 8 Dube and Lindner (2021) and Godoey and Reich (2021) found little employment impacts from minimum wage increases, even though the counties and cities they studied had minimum-to-median wage ratios of up to roughly 80%.

Another measure of the "bite" of the minimum wage is the share of the workforce affected by the policy. According to this statistic, the highwater 1968 national minimum wage is remarkably similar to the Raise the Wage Act. Estimates from Derenoncourt and Montialoux (2021) suggest that the 1968 policy directly affected an estimated 16.1% of the overall workforce and 28.8% of Black workers. 9 Above we estimate similar shares for a $15 minimum wage in 2025: 14.5% of all workers and 23.2% of Black workers would be directly affected. Given that the 1968 policy raised the incomes of the low-wage workforce without substantial job loss, we should feel confident that a phased-in $15 minimum wage in 2025 would do the same.

Despite such evidence, some still may maintain that concerns about job losses are warranted. To put these concerns in perspective, consider the predictions of CBO (2021), which estimated that a $15 minimum wage by 2025 would reduce low-wage employment by about 1.4 million. There are three reasons why this estimate is overstated. First, that particular employment reduction estimate is not well supported by the best research or even the typical minimum wage study; in Dube (2019a), the median estimate of the own-wage elasticity was -0.04, less than one-tenth the size of the employment response. Second, because CBO (2021) also estimated that a $15 minimum wage in 2025 would raise the earnings of 27 million workers, even accepting at face value the job loss estimate implies that about 95% of the low-wage workforce would benefit from the policy. Third, the focus on job loss gives the misleading impression that the policy would cause many workers to have no income over the course of a year; but because of the high degree of churn in the low-wage labor market, what is measured as job losses will actually be low-wage workers spending more time in between jobs, but earning more when they do work (Cooper, Mishel, and Zipperer 2018).

Minimum wage increases are extremely popular. Moreover, the highest approval of minimum wage increases comes from those groups who critics say are most likely to suffer job losses. An analysis of the 2016 American National Election Survey by Aaron Sojourner estimates that more than seven in 10 unemployed workers approved of raising the minimum wage (Sojourner 2021). Figure H also shows that the unemployed favor raising the minimum wage by an 11 percentage-point margin over those already employed. A stronger preference for minimum wage increases holds for other demographic groups who face greater obstacles in the labor market. Black and Hispanic adults are significantly more likely to approve of minimum wage increases than white adults. Women approve of minimum wage increases significantly more than men, with similar approval margins between those without and with a college degree.

Even with these margins, most demographic groups overwhelmingly approve of minimum wage increases. In fact, voters have approved every one of 22 state-level minimum wage increases on the ballot over the last two decades. 10

Conclusion

Currently, about four in 10 workers in the United States live in a state where minimum wages are eventually scheduled to rise to $15 per hour. 11 Yet without a stronger federal standard, most low-wage workers in this country will continue to experience the hardships and indignity of low pay.

The Raise the Wage Act charts the path forward to where we, as a society, should target a minimum wage in 2025. Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would secure a long-overdue improvement in living standards for the lowest-wage workers and will finally help ensure that full-time work is a means to escape poverty. The policy would significantly reduce long-standing race- and gender-based pay inequities and the inequities between how tipped and nontipped workers are treated. Finally, by automatically linking future increases to median wage growth, it will prevent those with the lowest pay from slipping behind.

Endnotes

1. Cooper and Kroeger (2017) explain how the tipped minimum wage is supposed to work and the problems with it: "In most states and under federal law, employers of workers who customarily receive tips-such as restaurant servers and nail salon attendants-may credit workers' tips against their required minimum wage. For example, federal law allows employers to pay tipped workers as little as $2.13 per hour, provided that the employees' tips over the course of a week raise their effective hourly pay to at least the minimum wage. If the tips are inadequate, employers are required to make up the difference. Unfortunately, policing this requirement is largely left to the tipped workers themselves, who would need to carefully track their weekly hours and tips to know if employers were paying an adequate base wage. Moreover, the FLSA and most state tipped wage laws do not specify the period over which weekly tips are supposed to be calculated, nor do they specify how employers are to treat secondary tipping-when tipped workers share a portion of their tips with support staff....The opaqueness of tipped wage laws leaves most tipped workers with little knowledge of their rights and particularly open to abuse."

2. The combination of critical infrastructure jobs and nontelework jobs is similar to approaches used by Blau, Koebe, and Meyerhofer (2020) and Goodnough and Hoffman (2020).

3. S. Rep. No. 75-884, at 4 (1937).

4. Using already scheduled state and local minimum wage increases, we estimate the employment-weighted minimum wage (with no change in the federal minimum) will be $11.53 in 2025. We apply the 0.263 log point increase to $15 to the range of long-run poverty rate elasticities in Table 7 of Dube (2019b), or -0.220 to -0.459, and to the nonelderly poverty rates in Table B-1 of U.S. Census Bureau 2020, which estimated that of 270.1 million children and nonelderly adults, 29.1 million lived in poverty, of which 35.9% were under the age of 18.

5. Gould, Cooke, and Kimball (2015) observe that "official" poverty rate methodology was designed in 1963 and has only been adjusted to account for overall inflation, and they contrast poverty thresholds and Family Budget thresholds.

6. After adjusting the 2017$ values in the Family Budget Calculator to 2021$, only Lucas County, Ohio ($14.80), .and Cameron County, Texas ($14.96), have family budget thresholds below $15 an hour for a single adult without children. We can expect that the Family Budget thresholds for both counties will exceed a $15 hourly equivalent by 2022.

7. Chicago (Cook County, $20.42), Miami (Miami-Dade County, $20.63), Phoenix (Maricopa County, $20.80).

8. The median hourly wage in 2019 was $19.33, and it would be $22.46 in 2025 assuming 0.5% real wage growth on top of CBO's (2021) CPI-U inflation projections.

9. Specifically, Derenoncourt and Montialoux (2021) estimated that, in the year prior to the 1968 increase, 16.1% of the overall workforce and 28.8% of Black workers would be directly affected by the new policy.

10. There have been 27 state-level ballot initiatives since 1996, and only two failed in that year. See Ballotpedia (2021).

11. Economic Policy Institute calculation using Current Employment Statistics data from the Bureau of Labor statistics. Values calculated using the listed states' share of total U.S. nonfarm employment in calendar year 2019 (prior to the COVID-19 pandemic). For recent minimum wage changes, see the Economic Policy Institute Minimum Wage Tracker, https://www.epi.org/minimum-wage-tracker/.

References

American National Elections Studies. 2019. "2016 Times Series Study." September 4, 2019 version. Accessed at https://electionstudies.org/data-center/2016-time-series-study/.

Ballotpedia. 2021. " Minimum Wage on the Ballot " (web page). Accessed February 15, 2021.

Blau, Francine D., Josefine Koebe, and Pamela A. Meyerhofer. 2020. " Who are the Essential and Frontline Workers? " NBER Working Paper 27791, September 2020.

Cengiz, Doruk, Arindrajit Dube, Attila Lindner, and Ben Zipperer. 2019. " The Effect of Minimum Wages on Low-Wage Jobs." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 134, no. 3, August 2019.

Congressional Budget Office (CBO). 2020. Budget and Economic Data: 10-Year Economic Projections. July 2020.

Congressional Budget Office (CBO). 2021. The Budgetary Effects of the Raise the Wage Act of 2021. February 2021.

Cooper, Daniel, María José Luengo-Prado, and Jonathan A. Parker. 2019. " The Local Aggregate Effects of Minimum Wage Increases." Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 52 (December 2019), 5-35.

Cooper, David. 2019. Raising the Federal Minimum Wage to $15 by 2024 Would Lift Pay for Nearly 40 Million Workers. Economic Policy Institute, February 2019.

Cooper, David, and Teresa Kroeger. 2017. Employers Steal Billions from Workers' Paychecks Each Year. Economic Policy Institute, May 2017.

Cooper, David, Lawrence Mishel, and Ben Zipperer. 2018. Bold Increases in the Minimum Wage Should be Evaluated for the Benefits of Raising Low-Wage Workers' Total Earnings. Economic Policy Institute, April 2018.

Cooper, David, Zane Mokhiber, and Ben Zipperer. 2019. Minimum Wage Simulation Model Technical Methodology. Economic Policy Institute, February 2019.

Derenoncourt, Ellora. 2020. " Just calculated the inflation-adjusted nat'l MW demanded by the March on Washington in August 1963 ($2/hr)." Twitter, @EDerenoncourt, July 23, 2020, 3:42 p.m.

Derenoncourt, Ellora, and Claire Montialoux. 2021. " Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality." Quarterly Journal of Economics 136, no. 1, February.

Dingel, Jonathan I., and Brent Neiman. 2020. " How Many Jobs Can Be Done at Home?" Journal of Public Economics 189, September 2020.

Dorman, Peter, and Lawrence Mishel. 2020. A Majority of Workers are Fearful of Coronavirus Infections at Work, Especially Black, Hispanic, and Low- and Middle-Income Workers. Economic Policy Institute, June 16, 2020.

Dube, Arindrajit. 2019a. Impacts of Minimum Wages: Review of the International Evidence. Report prepared for Her Majesty's Treasury (UK). November 2019.

Dube, Arindrajit. 2019b. " Minimum Wages and the Distribution of Family Incomes." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 11, no. 4: 268-304.

Dube, Arindrajit, and Attila Lindner. 2021. " City Limits: What Do Local-Area Minimum Wages Do?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 35, no. 1, Winter 2021.

Economic Policy Institute (EPI). 2018. Family Budget Calculator (interactive tool). Last updated March 2018.

Economic Policy Institute (EPI). 2021a. Current Population Survey Extracts, Version 1.0.13, https://microdata.epi.org.

Economic Policy Institute (EPI). 2021b. " The Impact of Raising the Minimum Wage to $15 by 2025, by Congressional District: Mapping the Impact of the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 on Workers " (interactive map). Accessed January 28, 2021.

Godoey, Anna, and Michael Reich. 2021. " Are Minimum Wage Effects Greater in Low-Wage Areas?" Industrial Relations, January 2021.

Goodnough, Abby, and Jan Hoffman. 2020. " The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First?" New York Times, December 5, 2020.

Gould, Elise. 2020. State of Working America Wages 2019: A Story of Slow, Uneven, and Unequal Wage Growth over the Last 40 Years, Economic Policy Institute, February 2020.

Gould, Elise, Tanyell Cooke, and Will Kimball. 2015. What Families Need to Get By: EPI's 2015 Family Budget Calculator. Economic Policy Institute, August 2015.

Gould, Elise, Zane Mokhiber, and Kathleen Bryant. 2018. The Economic Policy Institute's Family Budget Calculator: Technical Documentation. Economic Policy Institute, March 2018.

Johnson, Charles. 2018. " A Reflection: The Poor People's Campaign and Dr. King's Economic Vision." Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, April 27, 2018.

Kinder, Molly, and Laura Stateler. 2021. " Essential Workers Comprise About Half of All Workers in Low-Paid Occupations. They Deserve a $15 Minimum Wage." The Avenue, The Brookings Institution, February 5, 2021.

Labor Market Information Institute (LMI Institute). 2020. " Many U.S. Workers in Critical Occupations in the Fight Against COVID-19." Database, Version April 3, 2020. Accessed February 2021.

Lynn, M., M. Sturman, C. Ganley, E. Adams, M. Douglas, and J. McNeil. 2008. "Consumer Racial Discrimination in Tipping: A Replication and Extension." Journal of Applied Social Psychology 38, 1045-1060. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2008.00338.x.

McNicholas, Celine, and Margaret Poydock. 2020. " Who Are Essential Workers? A Comprehensive Look at Their Wages, Demographics, and Unionization Rates." Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), May 19, 2020.

National Women's Law Center. 2021. One Fair Wage: Women Fare Better in States with Equal Treatment for Tipped Workers. National Women's Law Center, February 2021.

Pitts, Steven C., and Sylvia Allegretto. 2013. To Work with Dignity: The Unfinished March Toward a Decent Minimum Wage. Economic Policy Institute, August 2013.

Raise the Wage Act of 2021, S. 53, 117th Cong. (2021).

Semega, Jessica, Melissa Kollar, Emily A. Shrider, and John F. Creamer. 2020. Income and Poverty in the United States: 2019. U.S. Census Bureau, September.

Sojourner, Aaron. 2021. " Most-recent data I found is ANES after 2016 election. 78% of unemployed jobseekers in the U.S. favored raising the minimum wage." Twitter, @aaronsojourner, February 6, 2021, 12:08 p.m.

Wilson, Valerie. 2020. " Inequities Exposed: How COVID-19 Widened Racial Inequities in Education, Health, and the Workforce." Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, June 22, 2020.

Wilson, Valerie, and William M. Rodgers III. 2016. Black-White Wage Gaps Expand with Rising Wage Inequality. Economic Policy Institute, September 2016.

Wursten, Jesse, and Michael Reich. 2021. " Racial Inequality and Minimum Wages in Frictional Labor Markets." IRLE Working Paper 101-21, February.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would lift the pay of 32 million workers: A demographic breakdown of affected workers and the impact on poverty, wages, and inequality

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Summary The Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would help eliminate poverty-level wages by raising the national minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025. This report finds that the raise is long overdue and would deliver broad benefits to workers and the economy. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour and has...

# data[].attributes.body
Free health care can be a good for the people and economy, but it also can be a problems that make it a challenge to accomplish.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
27.5 million people in the United States (8.5% of the US population) do not have health insurance. Among the 91.5% who do have health insurance, 67.3% have private insurance while 34.4% have government-provided coverage through programs such as Medicaid or Medicare. Employer-based health insurance is the most common type of coverage, applying to 55.1% of the US population. The United States is the only nation among the 37 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations that does not have universal health care either in practice or by constitutional right.

Proponents of the right to health care say that no one in one of the richest nations on earth should go without health care. They argue that a right to health care would stop medical bankruptcies, improve public health, reduce overall health care spending, help small businesses, and that health care should be an essential government service.

Opponents argue that a right to health care amounts to socialism and that it should be an individual's responsibility, not the government's role, to secure health care. They say that government provision of health care would decrease the quality and availability of health care, and would lead to larger government debt and deficits. Read more background...

Pro & Con Arguments

Pro 3

A right to health care could save lives.

According to a study from Harvard researchers, "lack of health insurance is associated with as many as 44,789 deaths per year," which translates into a 40% increased risk of death among the uninsured. Another study found that more than 13,000 deaths occur each year just in the 55-64 year old age group due to lack of health insurance coverage. A Commonwealth Fund study found that due to a lack of timely and effective health care, the United States ranked at the bottom of a list of 16 rich nations in terms of preventable mortality and a further study published in the Lancet ranked the United States 29 out of 195 countries and territories in terms of preventable mortality. In Italy, Spain, France, Australia, Israel, and Norway, all countries with a right to health care, people live up to five years longer than people in the United States.
Read More

Pro 4

The right to health care is an internationally recognized human right.

On Dec. 10, 1948 the United States and 47 other nations signed the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The document stated that "everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one's family, including... medical care." In 2005 the United States and the other member states of the World Health Organization signed World Health Assembly resolution 58.33, which stated that everyone should have access to health care services and should not suffer financial hardship when obtaining these services. According to a peer-reviewed study in the Lancet, "[r]ight-to-health features are not just good management, justice, or humanitarianism, they are obligations under human-rights law." The United States is the only OECD nation which does not have universal health care either in practice or by constitutional right. According to the Comparative Constitutions Project, as of 2019, over 130 countries have a right to health care in their national constitutions.
Read More

Pro 10

A right to health care could encourage entrepreneurship.

After the introduction of Obamacare, which increased access to health insurance for Americans, the number of self-employed Americans increased 150,000 between 2014 and 2016. 6.1% percentage of job-seekers started their own businesses in 2016, marking a four-year high. A study published in Contemporary and Economic Policy found that providing universal health care in the United States could increase self-employment by 2 to 3.5 percent.
Read More

Con 7

A right to health care could lead to government rationing of medical services.

Countries with universal health care, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, all ration health care using methods such as controlled distribution, budgeting, price setting, and service restrictions. In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service (NHS) rations health care using a cost-benefit analysis. For example, in 2018 any drug that provided an extra one year of good-quality life for about $25,000 or less was generally deemed cost-effective while one that costs more might not be. In order to expand health coverage to more Americans, Obamacare created an Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) to make cost-benefit analyses to keep Medicare spending from growing too fast. According to Sally Pipes, President of the Pacific Research Institute, the IPAB "is essentially charged with rationing care." According to a Wall Street Journal editorial, "once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable."
Read More

Con 8

A right to health care could lower the quality and availability of disease screening and treatment.

In countries with a universal right to health care certain disease treatment outcomes are worse than the United States. The US 5-year survival rate for all cancers is 67%, compared to 60% in Canada and 54% in the United Kingdom. Annually, there are fewer cancer deaths per 100,000 people in the United States than in Australia, France, Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom. Out of OECD nations, the United States is ranked at number two for breast cancer survival, behind only Sweden, and at number three for stroke survival, behind only Japan and South Korea. Statistics show that US cancer screening rates for cervical and colorectal (bowel) cancer are higher than those in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Read More

Con 11

People should pay for their own health care, not have it given to them by the government.

Under a single-payer system, the right to health care is paid for through taxes, and people who work hard and pay those taxes are forced to subsidize health care for those who are not employed. In the United States, people already have a right to purchase health care, but they should never have a right to receive health care free of charge. Health care is a service that should be paid for, not a right.
Read More

Did You Know?

1. 28.5 million people in the United States (8.8% of the US population) did not have health insurance in 2017, down from 47.9 million (15.4% of the US population) in 2012.

2. The United States is the only one of all 36 OECD nations that does not have universal health care either in practice or by constitutional right.

3. The United States spent $10,209 per person on health care in 2017, over 2.5 times the average spent by member countries of the OECD ($3,992 per person).

4. The US five-year survival rate for all cancers is 67%, over 10% higher than the five-year cancer survival rate in the United Kingdom (54%) and 7% higher than Canada.

5. Medical debt is the #1 reason people file for bankruptcy in the United States.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Right to Health Care - Pros & Cons - ProCon.org

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
27.5 million people in the United States (8.5% of the US population) do not have health insurance. Among the 91.5% who do have health insurance, 67.3% have private insurance while 34.4% have government-provided coverage through programs such as Medicaid or Medicare. Employer-based health insurance is the most common type of coverage, applying to 55.1% of [...]Read More...

# data[].attributes.body
An article with a pros and cons list, about whether or not college is worth it

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Frank Zappa, Musician

However, many of them also have concerns that college might not be the right way to go for them. Note that I was in a similar situation.

I got a Master's degree in Economics from university myself and therefore know what I'm talking about.

1. College education may lead to better job opportunities

2. Lower unemployment rates

3. Higher average salaries

4. Prerequisite for most management jobs

5. You may be able to avoid physically demanding work afterward

6. You will be more flexible regarding where and how to work

7. You may be able to afford better health insurance

8. Lower risk to slide into poverty

9. Risk for old-age poverty may be lower

10. You can learn how to deal with pressure

11. Many people think back to their college years as best time of their lives

12. You can meet many new people

13. College gives you the opportunity to build a strong network

14. You can learn persistence

15. You may get to know foreign exchange students

16. College education gives you the opportunity to expand your horizon

17. You can choose from a variety of different courses

18. College education is still considered to be the standard of good education

19. You may want to stay on the research track

20. You can spend a semester abroad

21. You will have plenty of leisure

22. Higher average life expectancy for people with college education

23. High level of education is crucial for a working society

24. Companies have it easier to find qualified employees

One important advantage of college education is that you will get better job opportunities on average.

In our nowadays state of the world, employers often require college degrees, even for many entry positions in companies.

Hence, you can consider a college degree as a sort of entry ticket for many jobs and if you don't have this ticket, it will be hard to get into many highly reputable companies.

College graduates also have much lower unemployment rates compared to the average person in many countries all over the world.

In fact, the higher the qualification level, the lower the chances for unemployment since people will have the opportunity to choose from a variety of different jobs and don't have to rely on a rather small niche.

Thus, if you want to maximize your chances to get a job and minimize the risk of unemployment in our nowadays age, college education may be the right way to go for you.

Another benefit of college education is that college graduates also earn significantly more money on average.

Consequently, if you aspire to a fancy lifestyle and want to make really good money, college will maximize your chances of reaching these goals.

Especially if you aspire after a demanding management career in a renowned company, college degrees are almost a must-have and you may even want to get a doctor's degree for this goal.

In fact, many members of the board of directors of big companies have college education or even a doctor's degree and it will be almost impossible to get into these positions without graduating from college.

Therefore, if you have these big goals, college education is definitely the way to go for you.

In fact, college prepares you for office jobs instead of blue-collar work.

Those office jobs can be quite demanding on a mental level, yet they do not require you to work in a physical manner.

You can also conveniently work inside instead of having to work outside when it rains or snows.

Hence, getting a college degree may also help you to avoid poor working conditions.

Another upside of going to college is that you can work in a more flexible manner.

In fact, for most office jobs that college graduates carry out, employees do not even have to be in the company in person.

Instead, people can often work from home since most of the work is carried out via computer.

Even video calls are possible in our current age.

Therefore, if you want to maximize your level of flexibility, going for college education and getting an office job where you can work from remote could be the best way to go for you.

Since your salary will likely be significantly higher with proper college education, you will also be able to afford much better health insurance compared to the average person in our society.

In fact, lack of health insurance is still a pretty big problem in our society and in case of emergency, many people will not be able to afford complex surgeries.

In turn, those people may suffer from serious long-term health issues or may even die from their health conditions since they will not be able to afford proper treatment.

College graduates also have a significantly lower risk to get into poverty.

This is due to the fact that the salaries of people with college degrees are much higher and also due to lower unemployment rates.

Both factors are closely connected to poverty and therefore, getting a college degree may also minimize your risk to slide into poverty.

Especially old-age poverty has become a big problem in our nowadays society.

Many people greatly underestimate this problem.

Especially if people don't earn too much money from their jobs, they will often not be able to save enough money for their retirement since they simply have to spend most of their money on basic things like rent and food.

Another advantage of going to college is that you can learn to deal with pressure.

Especially in periods where many exams take place in a rather short timeframe, you will have to manage your time in a quite efficient manner.

Those periods can be quite stressful and you may feel overwhelmed from time to time.

However, it is quite important that you learn to deal with this kind of pressure since you will face many challenges later on in your life and if you are not able to deal with pressure, you will likely not be able to succeed.

In general, many people also describe their college years as one of the best times of their lives.

In fact, college is a unique experience that will not be comparable to anything that comes along in the future.

I personally really enjoyed college life and it also gave me the opportunity to really grow in character.

I love to remember back to all those experiences I made during my college years and I definitely don't want to miss this period in my life.

Since you will have many different courses in college, you can also meet many new people over time.

In the long run, you can also make really good friends and you will stay connected with many of them over the course of many years or even for a lifetime.

Hence, if you are a person who loves to connect and to talk to other people, college can also give you a great opportunity to do so.

Another benefit of college is that it gives you the opportunity to build a strong network.

Especially if you attend a pretty renowned university, you can get in touch with many students who have influential parents and who will also work in demanding management jobs sooner or later.

If you connect with those people and spend plenty of time together, chances are that you will also stay connected after you graduated and you will also have many different contacts to companies those people will work in afterward.

Therefore, through this strong network, you will also have much better chances to get a demanding job in one of those companies.

In order to succeed in various parts of life, it is also crucial that you stay persistent and be the best version of yourself.

College education can also help you in this regard since you will have to stay focused over a couple of years in order to reach your goal.

In fact, you may have to push through difficult periods where you may be quite unmotivated.

However, once you finally graduate, you will get the feeling that you really achieved something and this will also give you strengths for potential challenges later on in your future.

During your college time, you will often also be able to connect to students from foreign countries who spend a semester abroad at your university.

This can be quite interesting since you will soon realize that the customs and cultural values of foreign people can be rather different compared to what you are used to.

Moreover, you can stay in contact with these foreign students through social media and you may visit them in their home country at one point in your life.

In general, since you will experience so many different things in college, you can also expand your horizon in various different directions.

You can take many different courses, figure out what you really like and go with it.

Moreover, college will also give you the opportunity to talk to many people from different cultural backgrounds with different social norms.

All this can give you a much better impression regarding how the world really looks like.

College education also offers you the opportunity to try yourself out in various different fields.

However, by taking many different courses, you may soon be able to realize what is really interesting to you. In turn, you may also be better able to decide what major you want to take.

In many countries all over the world, college education is still considered to be the gold standard when it comes to proper education.

In fact, many parents consider college education as a must-have for their kids.

Therefore, if you want to fit in the social narrative and want to be regarded as a valued member of our society, chances are that college education also provides you with the best opportunities in this regard.

Some people also really like college and decide to stay on the research track instead of working for a private corporation.

In fact, some people get their doctor's degree and will work as university lecturer later on.

Hence, if you love teaching and educating other people, this sort of career may also be suitable for you.

Another key advantage of going to college is that you can also spend a semester abroad.

In fact, I spent two semesters abroad and really learned quite a lot about myself.

Since you will have to organize everything on your own, you will really learn how to become independent and how to manage your life.

Moreover, you will experience a different culture and in case you stay at a guest family, you will also get to know many local traditions.

In fact, staying at my guest family was great and we are still in contact via social media.

Hence, if you go for college education and can afford to spend a semester abroad, I would definitely recommend you take this opportunity since it can really benefit you in various different ways.

College can also be the period of your life in which you will have the most leisure.

Sure, many people have to work in a student job and also have to prepare for exams.

However, you will still be much more flexible in college compared to the time after you graduated and work in an office job for long hours every day.

Therefore, if you want to have a period in your life where you can really enjoy plenty of leisure, college can also help you in this regard.

Studies have shown that college graduates will also have a significantly higher average life expectancy.

This can be attributed to the fact that they will earn more money and will be able to afford better health insurance on average.

Hence, college graduates will get better medical treatment in case of emergency and will therefore also live longer on average.

Apart from the individual opportunities of college education, it can also have strong positive effects on our society as a whole.

In fact, education is crucial for a peaceful society and also that people know what's going on in the world.

It is also important to prevent the rise of radical political movements.

Therefore, high levels of education are crucial for a working society in various different ways and college education can also help in this regard.

Many companies also struggle to find highly-qualified employees in many parts of our planet.

Hence, if more people get a college degree, those companies may have an easier time finding qualified employees and may therefore also be able to increase their profits and to strengthen their overall market position in the long run.

1. College can be pretty expensive

2. Many students have to get student loans for college

3. Children from poor families often can't afford college education

4. College education has lost its reputation

5. Quality of education greatly varies across colleges

6. Not everyone gets a good job afterward

7. College education may no longer provide better job opportunities in the future

8. You will lose many years that you could have spent in the workforce

9. Many people are just not made for college

10. Some people don't want to work in an office job

11. College doesn't prepare you sufficiently for real life

12. Digital skills are often missing in college education

13. Teachers may be quite unmotivated

14. College can lead to mental issues

15. Many college students feel lost in life

16. College students may be financially dependent on their parents

17. You may quit college after a while

18. Many people overestimate the positive effects of college education

19. Student debt may have the potential to cause a serious financial crisis

Apart from the many important advantages of college education, there are also many issues related to this concept.

For instance, one major problem of college education is that it can be pretty expensive.

In fact, tuition fees, housing and additional costs can add up to several hundreds of thousands of dollars until you finally get your college degree.

Therefore, college is quite costly and you should evaluate for yourself whether you are willing to spend those enormous amounts of money for your college degree or not.

In case your parents cannot help you with financing your college degree, you will often also have to get a student loan.

However, these loans can be considered to be the worst form of debt since you cannot declare bankruptcy on them in many countries all over the world.

Hence, if you have to get a significant student loan, chances are that you will have to pay back this money for many years to come and this financial burden may hold you back in several different ways in your future life.

Another downside of college is that children from poor families will often not be able to afford college education at all.

Most of the time, parents of those children will not be able to financially support them and a student loan will also not be enough to cover all the expenses related to college.

Thus, most kids from poor families will not get the opportunity for proper college education and may therefore get stuck in poverty.

Opponents of college education also often claim that college has lost its reputation.

Just a few decades ago, only a small fraction of the overall population got a degree from university and this degree therefore had a high worth.

However, in our current state of the world, so many people attend college that such a degree is nothing special anymore.

Another disadvantage of college education is that the quality of education greatly varies across colleges.

In fact, while some institutions like Harvard or Princeton offer world-class education, many community colleges only offer rather limited educational quality and degrees from those colleges may therefore not have too much value.

Hence, if you really want to go to college, make sure that you choose a good university that really is worth the large amounts of money you have to spend on it.

Many kids also live in the illusion that everyone who gets a college degree also gets a good job afterward.

However, this is not the case at all.

In fact, there are many college graduates out there who work in jobs for which they would not even have needed a college degree.

Therefore, make sure that you get your degree in a major that is urgently needed on the local job market in order to avoid any unpleasant surprises regarding your job options later on in your life.

In general, it is rather questionable whether college education really provides you with better job opportunities in the long run.

College education has become a mass product and it is nothing special to get a degree anymore.

Also employers notice this and are often not satisfied with the skills college graduates bring to the table.

Consequently, college degrees may be rather worthless in the near future and you may want to use the money you would have spent on college education for starting your own business instead since it might have a much better return on investment in the long run.

Another downside of college is that you will lose many years that you could have worked in a job and could have earned significant amounts of money.

In fact, if you aspire after a Master's degree or even a Ph.D., chances are that you will have to spend many years in college and when you finally graduate and are ready to enter the job market, you will be much older than your competitors.

Hence, apart from the high costs of college, the fact that you will lose many years in the workforce makes it even more questionable whether the ROI on college education is really positive.

There are also many people out there who would be far better off working as a craftsman instead of getting a college degree.

In fact, in my opinion, far too few people follow their passion and buy into the social narrative that college education is the best way to go for everyone.

Hence, if you really don't want to go to college for various reasons, there are plenty of other ways how you can live a happy life.

Many people also don't want to work in office jobs for their whole lives.

However, college prepares you for exactly those kinds of jobs.

Thus, if you already know that you don't want to work in an office job for long hours on a regular basis, chances are that most college degrees will not be suitable for you and you should look out for other alternatives instead.

In my opinion, another major issue with college education is that college doesn't really prepare you for real life.

College is often quite structured and students don't have to organize too much on their own.

However, real life doesn't work like that and many college degrees experience some sort of shock when they finally graduate and realize that the skills you learn in college are often not suitable to succeed in real life.

In our nowadays state of the world, it is also crucial that students learn digital skills since those skills will be required on the job market in the near future.

In fact, many jobs that require manual work right now will be automized in the future and therefore, many workers may end up in unemployment.

Hence, you have to learn those digital skills in order to stay competitive and to avoid unemployment.

However, many colleges have still not adapted to those new requirements and don't teach their students those important digital skills.

Thus, if you want to attend college, make sure that you take enough computer science classes in order to get the skill set that will be required from you in the future.

Many college instructors are often also quite unmotivated and do not care about the learning experience of students too much.

Hence, if this is the case in your college classes, make sure that you study hard on your own in order to acquire the knowledge that will be necessary to compete in the fierce global job market.

The pressure in college can be enormous.

Especially during exam periods, college students often suffer from extremely high stress levels.

In turn, some of them also develop serious mental issues since they simply feel overwhelmed and are not able to figure out how to manage this workload.

Hence, if you are a person who can't deal with a high workload and stress in a healthy manner, college may also not be the way to go for you.

Many college graduates also feel rather lost in life once they completed their degree.

This is due to the fact that many college graduates simply don't know what they want to do with their lives.

Therefore, if you want to go to college, make sure that you have plans for your future so that you really have a goal to work for.

Due to the enormous financial burden related to college education, many students also have to get financial support from their parents.

However, this also leads to serious financial dependence on their parents and dependence is never a good thing.

In fact, as long as you are dependent on a person, you will never be free to do whatever you want to do.

Consequently, college education may also take away significant levels of freedom from you.

Some people also drop out of college after a while.

Those people often realize that college is not for them at all and they do not want to waste additional time and money on it.

However, dropping out of college also implies significant sunk costs which you will never get back.

Hence, make sure that you really want to go to college in order to avoid those unnecessary dropout costs.

College is an established institution in many countries all over the world.

Hence, people also often greatly overestimate the positive effects of college education.

Although college degrees can be the entry ticket for the corporate world, your success in business rather depends on your performance in your job and after a few years in the corporate world, employers will often no longer care about your degree too much.

Apart from the downsides of college education for students, college education and the related student debt can also have detrimental effects on our financial system.

In fact, total student debt in the United States had exceeded the trillion-dollar mark and in case many students may no longer be able to pay back these enormous amounts of debt, this could be the start of the next serious financial crisis.

College education can lead to higher salaries

College education is expensive

May lower your risk for unemployment

Many students need student loans

You can work in more interesting jobs

May no longer be necessary in the future

College education can open doors for you

College education is no magic pill

Prerequisite for management jobs

Kids from poor families can't afford college

You can meet many new people

College is not necessary for many jobs

You can develop your character

Quality of college education greatly varies

You can make a semester abroad

Not everyone gets a good job after graduating

College may provide you with plenty of leisure

College may lead to mental problems

You can learn persistence in college

Some people just drop out of college

We can conclude from the previous discussion that there are many advantages and disadvantages of college education.

In my opinion, you should ask yourself whether college education brings you closer to your goals in life or not.

If it can help you to achieve these goals, go for it.

Otherwise, you may want to go in a different direction instead since you can save plenty of time, money and effort if you don't go to college.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/201808/22-tips-first-year-college-students https://collegeinfogeek.com/42-things-i-learned-freshman-year/ About the author
My name is Andreas and my mission is to educate people of all ages about our environmental problems and how everyone can make a contribution to mitigate these issues.

As I went to university and got my Master's degree in Economics, I did plenty of research in the field of Development Economics.

After finishing university, I traveled around the world. From this time on, I wanted to make a contribution to ensure a livable future for the next generations in every part of our beautiful planet.

Wanna make a contribution to save our environment? Share it!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Is College Worth It? 43 Pros & Cons Of College Education - E&C

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Many people in our society question if going to college is a good idea. In this article, the pros and cons of college education are shown.

# data[].attributes.body
Pro's on how it helped families after the pandemic and what was reduced. Cons on what the government thought and their expectations on how people would spend the money

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Stimulus Checks Substantially Reduced Hardship, Study Shows

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Researchers found that sharp declines in food shortages, financial instability and anxiety coincided with the two most recent rounds of payments.

# data[].attributes.body
The article talks about tax evasion as a whole and how it's done by millionaires. How some places may tackle it raising/creating higher tax brackets

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Massachusetts is rich beyond most folks' comprehension. So why, with all the abundance, is there heavy resistance to a simple concept that those who earn a lot more should pay a little bit more proportionally in state taxes?

That's the fundamental concept behind the so-called millionaires tax, an initiative likely to reemerge and make it to the ballot inthe 2022 election.It is a surtax on incomes exceeding $1 million: Any extra dollar earned beyond $1 million would be taxed at an additional 4 percent - in effect 9 cents on that extra dollar when the state's 5 percent tax rate is added.

If you're less fortunate, you could muddle through making only $999,000 in a year and still be taxed at the 5 percent state rate.

Having the very rich pay a higher percentage in income taxes than the poor, working, and middle class isn't exactly a radical concept. It's what happens every year with federal taxes. And many states have graduated rates that rise as income increases.

Massachusetts' flat income tax - which is baked into the state Constitution - actually translates into lower-income residents paying more as a proportion of their income than the rich. The state's wealth leaves us with one of the widest gaps between the rich and poor in the nation, the latter now coming out of the coronavirus pandemic in far worse shape than going in. Extra revenue could pay for improved public transportation, reduced state college tuition and fees, and extra support for struggling school systems, to name a few.

The first millionaires tax effort, called the Fair Share Amendment, was struck from the ballot in 2018 because it stipulated - unconstitutionally, as it turned out - where the anticipated taxes would be directed. But the process to get it on the ballot in 2022 is in motion.

"Working families here in the Commonwealth are tapped out, with the high cost of housing, health care, transportation, child care, and other day-to-day expenses," said state Senator Jason Lewis at a virtual event about the Fair Share Amendment held in early May bysupporters of the tax. Lewis is a cosponsor of the proposal in the Legislature. Advocates believe that if state lawmakers initiate the fair share constitutional amendment this time, it might circumvent the legal issue that struck down the earlier effort.

Critics are already launching their attacks. We're told the extra taxes might scare away the rich. They could go to Florida, for example, which has no state income tax. But other states with similar millionaires taxes are doing just fine. An exodus of millionaires is an oversimplification; in reality, the decision to move involves other factors, such as family and community ties. It's why some millionaires in New Jersey, where the tax was approved recently, are staying put. And California, for one, is sporting a massive budget surplus.

And we're told we don't need the revenue, given the COVID-19 federal stimulus dollarsraining down on us. That is, of course, short-term thinking. The extra $1 billion-plus that the millionaires tax would generate would continue long after the stimulus money has been spent. There is, of course, the long shadow of the "Taxachusetts" moniker and the idea that raising taxes is an immoral idea that would render the state uncompetitive for businesses. But the facts show that Massachusetts taxes on businesses fall in the middle range.

Those who have been blessed with financial success at a level that most of us can only dream of ought to pay more for the common good so that many more people would have more opportunities. It's why a MassINC December poll found overwhelming support - 72 percent - for the Fair Share Amendment among voters. In a post-pandemic era when disparities between the fortunate and the less fortunate are widening, a surtax on the wealthy makes perfect sense.

Marcela García can be reached at marcela.garcia@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @marcela_elisa.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why the rich should pay more in taxes - The Boston Globe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Massachusetts is rich beyond most folks' comprehension. So why, with all the abundance, is there heavy resistance to a simple concept that those who earn a lot more should pay a little bit more proportionally in state taxes?