"A Better Way to Raise Incomes" Summary

This article starts off by talking about how politicians across the country (including the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate and possibly the Republican one) have called for raising the minimum wage.  When they say that they want to raise the minimum wage it isn't just by a little; it's all the way to $15 an hour which is over double what the minimum wage is now.

Candidates justify their proposal by saying that you can't support a family on the current minimum wage.  The thing is that they fail to acknowledge that minimum wage workers with families to support are already able to receive a financial boost under a national program called the earned-income tax credit.  If the minimum wage were to be raised to $15 an hour, prices of other things would go up.  The tax credit we have now works just fine; it helps low-skilled workers in proportion to their household need, taking pressure off the minimum wage as the only guarantor of a "living wage."

The only catch to the tax credit is that you have to be working to qualify for it.  Candidates should be working on improving the tax credit instead of trying to raise minimum wage and mess with the economy.

I chose this source because Peter D. Salins, the author of this article, is a professor of political science at Stony Brook University and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Citation

 Salins, Peter. "A Better Way to Raise Incomes." The New York Times. The New York Times, 06 July 2016. Web. 08 Sept. 2016.