The Effect of Minimum Wage

I read an article called "The Effects of Minimum Wage" which is written by Roger Leroy Millar, Daniel K. Benjamin, and Douglass C. North. This article mainly showed the proponents' and opponents' opinions on the changes of minimum wage. Also, it provided several statistics examples and two researches to analysis the effects of minimum wage changes.

In the article, the authors mentioned that the federal minimum wage kept increasing in the past 20 or more years. It always brought up a huge discussion in the society whether it can improve the standard of living or not. The supporters of minimum wages advocated that the labors who earned the low salary were not able to maintain their families' daily expenditure. Even if they work full time, their wages were still lower than the standard of supporting a normal family sufficiently from the government's expectation. The advocates also claimed that the high minimum wage could avoid the exploitation of employees. Conversely, the opponents appealed that the calculations of measuring the minimum wages were inappropriate since low-income labors normally were the single like teenagers who did not need to support their families or the people who were lack of skills. Moreover, David Card and Alan Krueger's research found that there was no adverse short-run impact on employment in New Jersey. However, other scholars reveled that there were significant differences between the short-run and long-run effects of changes in minimum wages across diverse provinces, especially in Canada. The scholars claimed that the high minimum wages would result the unfavorable effects in the long run since most of the companies were willing to diminish the available job opportunities in the society, especially the small firms. In addition, since the result of the minimum wage was employment declined, it would affect the minority teenagers. The disadvantage was the youths lost the chances to acquire basic working skills and training. Oppositely, the changes of minimum wage seemed to move up the economic ladder in someway. Furthermore, the authors stated that the problems of minimum wage were the employers would discriminate in favor of gender or race, provide fewer fringe benefits to the employees, and decrease the desire to train the labors that were lack of basic job skills.

In my opinion, I think that the change of minimum wage is a hard decision to make in the society. Actually, governments always like to provide a perfect environment for people, and improve the standard of living. Nevertheless, the fact is everything would have either sides of influences, both advantages and disadvantages. There was no ideal situation existed in the world. I think that the most important point is how to make the changes effective in the society with limited negative impacts, and how to solve the problems successfully in specific conditions. I believe that an appropriate adjustment on minimum