Twenty-One States to Raise Minimum Wage in 2015
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iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — Workers in nearly half the country can expect a little extra money in their pockets come 2015.
As the new year rolls in on Thursday, 21 states will be raising their minimum wage.
“Mostly we’re talking about minimum wages that are maybe around 8, 9, topping out around $10. So at least people are getting a little bit of a raise; I don’t think it’s going to add a huge amount of spending to the U.S. economy but it will certainly help a little bit for a lot of people,” says Yahoo! Finance’s Rick Newman.
He explains, “States and localities are just taking it upon themselves — which they have the right to do — to say, you know we want to change things where we live. In a way that’s actually more appropriate when it comes to the minimum wage.”
On the federal level, a bill to boost the pay scale has been stalled in Congress over partisan opposition. But Newman says there’s a solution that puts politics aside.
“This a simple problem to solve at the national level. The minimum wage should simply be indexed for inflation the way social security payments are, for instance. It should just go up every year for inflation so Congress never has to deal with it, but of course, that’s not what happens,” he says.
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