The Minimum Wage A Living Wage Essay

In the article, “Let’s Make the Minimum Wage a Living Wage” by Ira Knight, he argues how the economy would benefit from a minimum wage increase and he uses a lot of studies to back up his claims. Janice Steele, however, argues that raising the minimum wage will hurt small business and job opportunity. She uses fear to influence workers into not increasing minimum wage by making large generalizations. The article “Let’s Make the Minimum Wage a Living Wage” by Ira Knight and the article by Janice Steele “Keep the Minimum Wage Where It Is” both had good points. However, Ira Knight makes a stronger argument.
To begin, Ira Knight used more credible studies and evidence to support his claim. For example, he wrote, “A 2011 study from the Chicago

Federal Reserve Bank showed that increasing the minimum wage leads to higher consumer spending.” This means the economies supply and demand would increase resulting in a healthier economy. As the economy becomes better and supply and demand becomes stronger the number of jobs increase which result in a healthy job flow. Janice Steele doesn’t see it this way and says “While this seems like it would help them, increasing the minimum wage hurts the very people it is supposed to help: workers.” She uses no evidence and is talking about her own opinion on the subject rather than evidence to show she is creditable in this argument.
In addition, Ira Knight goes into studies on how for every dollar the minimum wage has increased, the spending of households has gone up by $2,800 dollars.

Meaning that people have wanted things and now have the money to buy them, resulting households and families are now happy. When the money they make is increased and they can actually buy what they want that makes them happy. They actually search for jobs and show up for them. Janice Steele argues that small businesses will be hurt as they will have to downsize employees, but has no evidence backing it up resulting in a fear tactic over actual evidence.
Furthermore, while Janice Steele says “A 2014 report from the Congressional Budget Office estimates that if the minimum wage were raised $1.75 more than 100,000 jobs.” This is a small amount of jobs compared to the amount of people’s lives that improve. As seen in Ira Knights research “A 2014 study from the Center for America showing that 3.5 million people would be able to get off of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.” Hence, from just a minimum wage increase a large number of lives have been improved from such a small change.
In conclusion, Ira Knight has used relevant and recent studies to back up his claim that he wants to make the minimum wage a living wage. While Janice Steele uses opinions and future events that have not happened, resulting in Ira Knight making a better

argument.