What if the minimum wage is increased to $ 15 an hour as suggested by Joe Biden's stimulus bill? | The State
The current federal minimum wage is $ 7.25 per hour.
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JOEL SAGET / AFP / Getty Images
The president-elect Joe biden announced a $ 1.9 trillion stimulus bill for people and the economy to recover from the pandemic of COVID-19. The project includes a $ 1,400 stimulus check for a large number of workers, $ 400 dollars in unemployment benefits, tax credits for families, support for education, increased resources for vaccines and an increase in the minimum wage at least $ 15 dollars an hour.
“No one who works 40 hours a week should live below the poverty line,” Biden said, addressing the nation during a message Thursday. “That’s what it means, if you work for less than $ 15 an hour and work 40 hours a week, you are living in poverty,” the president-elect said.
What would happen to a minimum wage of $ 15 an hour?
The current federal minimum wage is $ 7.25 per hour and it increased for the last time in 2009. During the beginning of the year several states modified the minimum wage by a few cents and in others it exceeded an additional dollar to adjust the cost of living. (You can learn more in the table we created).
“People tell me that it will be difficult to pass, Florida has just modified it, as divided as the state is, they just passed it,” Biden said in his message. “The rest of the country is ready to modify it.”
During his message, the president-elect continued to address the growing income inequality that increased the pandemic, separating the immense fortunes that the pandemic caused in companies listed on Wall Street from the “real economy”, in which people depend on their “ paychecks, not investment checks ”to feed their families.
President-elect Biden will outline his America Rescue Plan to fund vaccinations and provide immediate, direct relief to working families and communities bearing the brunt of this crisis. https://t.co/gz80hwWoVt
– Biden-Harris Presidential Transition (@ Transition46) January 15, 2021
Related: What are the states that will increase the minimum wage as of January 1, 2021?
Workers who receive the minimum salary they are generally young people and work in the service sector such as restaurants and hotels that have been affected during the closures due to the pandemic.
According to a 2019 report from the Congressional Budget Office, raising the minimum wage to $ 15 would boost the income of about $ 17 million people, lifting 1.3 million Americans out of poverty. The same report notes that other 1.3 million Americans they would lose their jobs because employers would find them too expensive to hire.
For its part, a 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that two-thirds of Americans support raising the minimum wage at $ 15 per hour.
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