we should riase the minimum wage

When wages rise, more workers enter the job market, allowing businesses to choose more high-skilled workers. This improves a small-business owner's opportunity to improve productivity through the use of higher-quality workers not previously available. Some small-business owners might choose to increase wages and decreasing the number of staffers as higher pay can motivate better-skilled workers and increase productivity. A living wage ensures that a worker can pay for basic necessities like housing, food, transportation to work and health care. A common definition states that the living wage should be high enough that no more than 30% of take-home pay needs to be spent on housing. But in most areas of the country, full-time employees being paid the current minimum wage will have incomes below the living wage. In dollar terms, that means that if you are a full-time worker supporting a family of four on the current minimum wage, your household income is $7,000 below the poverty line. Proponents of raising the minimum wage to a living wage argue that doing so would give workers and their families a better chance of climbing out of debt and poverty An increase of a couple of dollars per hour or more in the minimum wage could make huge improvements in the difficult existence of the working poor, maybe allowing them to exit the debt treadmill and stand a better chance of eventually rising into a revitalized middle-class. Admittedly, corporate profits might suffer a little and some businesses at the lowest end might disappear. Corporate profits as a percentage of national economic output are already at an all-time record level. And it's questionable whether such levels of profitability can be sustained. Firms have lots of unused capacity lying around because people can't afford to buy products or services, also, sluggish sales growth is directly connected to lagging wage rates.