Define States rights

Advocates for states rights point have reasoned that the Constitution was created
by the States as an agreement for all involved, that states were to be equal with
national government. They base this reasoning on the Constitutions authors, which
were representatives of the state, and how it was ratified, which was by the states,
and many other factors. The states rights view has always been to stop too much
power and responsibility going to the government in Washington, D.C.
Citations:

Patrik Jonsson Staff writer of The Christian,Science Monitor. "If Minimum

Wage is Raised, Who Benefits? ; Congress has Started a Debate on Raising
the $5.15-an-Hour Minimum Wage. the Senate Rejected a Big Hike
Wednesday." The Christian Science Monitor, Jun 22, 2006.
Krueger, Alan B. "The Minimum Wage: How Much is Too Much?" New York
Times Company, last modified Oct 09.
Summary:
Congress in 2006 had disagreed with raising the minimum wage but this
effects all those who are the breadwinners of the family. Many people are
struggling to keep just the necessities on the table. They are pleading with
those in government to put themselves in the peoples shoes. They all
come from different backgrounds such as single moms, immigrants,
grandmothers, etc. Financial experts have expressed concern for raising
minimum wages and that this will give businesses a motive to not hire lowskilled workers resulting either the loss of jobs or lack of work.
In 2009 the federal minimum wage was stuck at $7.25 an hour. Congress
declined to take action and this caused states and cities to raise their
minimum wages, therefore taking it into their own hands. Majority of the
states exceeded the federal level of minimum wage. Research cannot
provide the answers to questions about how beneficial or harmful raising
the minimum wage could be, but it is understood that straying too far away
from the minimum wage that was studied in the past is very risky. Either
way the states and cities are trying to exercise their rights to decide what is
best for themselves.

If Minimum Wage is Raised, Who Benefits? ; Congress has Started a

Debate on Raising the $5.15-an-Hour Minimum Wage. the Senate
Rejected a Big Hike Wednesday.
Keisha Walker, for one, is happy that Congress is at least debating whether
to raise the minimum wage. For her, boosting it to $7.25 would mean earning
an extra $1 an hour - enough to pay for eight months of groceries or perhaps
a few nights out.
An office assistant for a low-income apartment complex in Atlanta, earning
$6.25 an hour, Ms. Walker is one of 139,000 Georgians who would benefit
directly from a minimum-wage hike. A technical school dropout and mom in
her late 20s, she scratches together a living, relying on her fiance to pay
major bills.
"They need to raise it if only to help people pay for [rising] rent," she says,
returning by bus from taking her two sons and a nephew to football practice.
"It's getting so you can't survive in this country."
Such a raise looks unlikely, with the Senate Wednesday voting down a wagehike amendment and a House committee poised to do the same. Still, the
debate focuses attention on people at the very lowest wage rungs. When
adjusted for rising living costs, those earning minimum wage make less per
hour today than they have in the past 51 years. A glimpse at this low-wage
workforce shows a broad blend of faces and backgrounds from teenage
lifeguards to single moms, from immigrants to grandmothers, that, together,
wage-hike proponents say, form an alliance of the chronically underpaid.
But whether the fortunes of these 8 million Americans, earning less than
$7.25 an hour, would rise or falter under the first government-ordered wage
hike in 10 years is the broader debate spreading from restaurant kitchens on
Capitol Hill to the grocery store aisles of Atlanta.
"The typical minimum-wage worker is not a teenager earning side money,"
says Isaac Shapiro, an associate director at the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington. "Most minimum-wage
workers, those most affected by the wage increase and those just above the
minimum wage, their earnings can really be vital to their household
economics."
Big contributors to household income
Some 48 percent, or 3.5 million, are between 25 and 64 years old who, on
average, contribute more than half of the income in their households,
experts say. Raising the minimum wage is a $18.4 billion proposition that is

supported by 83 percent of Americans, according to the Pew Center for the

People and the Press.
"This is an issue that has to do with the fact that economic growth is not
being shared equitably among all Americans," says a spokesman for Rep.
George Miller (D) of California, who had introduced a minimum-wage bill last
year.
Lanky, with a wide smile and a tight-knit straw hat on his head, Thomas, a
Liberian immigrant who prefers not to give his last name, worked for five
years as a gas-station attendant, never making more than $5.15 an hour. It
was so little money he had to quit. He went freelance, selling mattresses on
the street from the back of his beat-up Chevrolet truck. He rents a room with
a friend in a flop house. He sends his extra money back home to Liberia - or
gives it to needy people in his neighborhood.
"There's no way you can depend on one job anymore," says Thomas. "You
have to get out there and hustle, have two or three different things going, to
make it work. Everyone is suffering. They all tell you the same story."
According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, nearly a third of
the workers who start at minimum wage are still working at that rate three
years later. A quarter, also like Thomas, stop working - or at least leave
official payrolls. Thirty-nine percent move up to better wages.
In Atlanta, working full time at minimum wage amounts to a third of the
$32,000 a year it takes for a no-frills life, says the Center for Economic and
Policy Research. Only six percent of Georgia residents hold low-wage jobs,
while states like Montana, West Virginia, and Alabama have the highest
rates, around 10 percent. Twenty-one states have set higher-than-national
minimum wage rates.
One reason even some Republicans are mulling the wage hike is that the
number of single mothers making minimum wage has nearly doubled in the
last 10 years. Of Americans making less than $7.25 an hour, half are over 24
years old, and about half are primary household earners. Sixty-two percent
are white, 16 percent are black, and 17 percent are Hispanic. Nearly twice as
many are women than men.
"The relative value of the minimum wage has fallen by nearly 20 percent,"
says Heather Boushey, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy
Resarch. "These families are already living at the bottom, and you're talking
about families who didn't have a lot of frills to begin with."
For Ms. Walker, the Atlanta office assistant, rising child-care costs mean that
her weekly paycheck is not enough to stay employed, at least when school is

out, so she took the summer off to care for her two boys, Derick and Rico.
That means she has learned how to cook and takes the bus. Her boys'
football program is subsidized. Movie nights are out. Cookouts in the park are
in.
"I'm lucky to have someone who can help out," she says. "A lot of people
don't."
One of them is Mary Davidson, a single, 50-something dry- cleaning clerk in
Charlotte, N.C.. Rising gas prices forced her to look for work closer to home.
She found a job at $6.50 an hour, and she took it.
Going out to eat is out of the question. But she finds solace in her church
choir, but feels guilty even there. Her income, especially working only 20
hours a week, doesn't allow her the 10 percent tithe that is expected.
"I'm making $6.50 - that's no money!" she says. "People should understand,
especially people at the White House behind a desk - put yourself in my
shoes. Pay my money for your bills. See if you can make it!"
Are minimums counterproductive?
But some economists say the minimum wage does more damage than good,
and see its diminishing value as a sign of its waning importance. After all,
they say, the number of people who would be affected by the wage increase
has decreased from 10 million in 1996 to some 8 million today, while
average wages have risen from $12 to $16 an hour since the last hike.
In fact, they say, upping wages will only create incentives for businesses to
hire fewer low-skilled workers - which is what happened when at least
146,000 restaurant workers lost their jobs after the last minimum-wage hike,
according to the National Restaurant Association.(c) Copyright 2006. The
Christian Science Monitor

The Minimum Wage: How Much Is Too Much?

THE federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.
While Congress has refused to take action, Democratic politicians have been
engaged in something of a bidding war to propose raising the minimum
wage ever higher: first to $10.10, then to $12, and now some are pushing for
$15 an hour.
Research suggests that a minimum wage set as high as $12 an hour will do
more good than harm for low-wage workers, but a $15-an-hour national
minimum wage would put us in uncharted waters, and risk undesirable and
unintended consequences.
When Congress delays raising the minimum wage, states and cities typically
step in and raise their own minimum wages. That is exactly what is
happening now.
More than half of the states, representing 60 percent of the United States
population, now have minimum wages that exceed the federal level . The
fact that voters in four "red" states -- Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South
Dakota -- voted overwhelmingly last year to raise their states' minimum
wages to as high as $9.75 an hour is a testament to the support the
minimum wage enjoys among the population at large.
Some cities plan to raise their wage floors to $15 an hour. And Gov. Andrew
M. Cuomo declared last month that "every working man and woman in the
state of New York deserves $15 an hour as a minimum wage."
When I started studying the minimum wage 25 years ago, like most
economists at that time I expected that the wage floor reduced employment
for some groups of workers. But research that I and others have conducted
convinced me that if the minimum wage is set at a moderate level it does
not necessarily reduce employment. While some employers cut jobs in
response to a minimum-wage increase, others find that a higher wage floor
enables them to fill their vacancies and reduce turnover, which raises
employment, even though it eats into their profits. The net effect of all this,
as has been found in most studies of the minimum wage over the last
quarter-century, is that when it is set at a moderate level, the minimum
wage has little or no effect on employment.
For example, David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, and I found
that when New Jersey raised its minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.05 an hour
in 1992 (or from about $7.25 to $8.60 in today's dollars), job growth at fastfood restaurants in the state was just as strong as it was at restaurants
across the border in Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage remained $4.25

an hour. Equally important -- but less well known -- within New Jersey, job
growth was just as strong at low-wage restaurants that were constrained by
the law to raise pay as it was at higher-wage restaurants that were not
directly affected by the increase since their workers already earned more
than the new minimum.
I am frequently asked, "How high can the minimum wage go without
jeopardizing employment of low-wage workers? And at what level would
further minimum wage increases result in more job losses than wage gains,
lowering the earnings of low-wage workers as a whole?"
Although available research cannot precisely answer these questions, I am
confident that a federal minimum wage that rises to around $12 an hour over
the next five years or so would not have a meaningful negative effect on
United States employment. One reason for this judgment is that around 140
research projects commissioned by Britain's independent Low Pay
Commission have found that the minimum wage "has led to higher than
average wage increases for the lowest paid, with little evidence of adverse
effects on employment or the economy." A $12-per-hour minimum wage in
the United States phased in over several years would be in the same ballpark
as Britain's minimum wage today.
But $15 an hour is beyond international experience, and could well be
counterproductive. Although some high-wage cities and states could
probably absorb a $15-an-hour minimum wage with little or no job loss, it is
far from clear that the same could be said for every state, city and town in
the United States.
More logical is the proposed legislation from Senator Patty Murray, Democrat
of Washington, and Robert C. Scott, Democrat of Virginia, calling for raising
the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020. Their bill is co-sponsored
by 32 senators, and supported by President Obama and Hillary Clinton. Highwage cities and states could raise their minimums to $15.
Although the plight of low-wage workers is a national tragedy, the push for a
nationwide $15 minimum wage strikes me as a risk not worth taking,
especially because other tools, such as the earned-income tax credit, can be
used in combination with a higher minimum wage to improve the livelihoods
of low-wage workers.
Economics is all about understanding trade-offs and risks. The trade-off is
likely to become more severe, and the risk greater, if the minimum wage is
set beyond the range studied in past research.