REPUBLICAN OPPOSITION TO MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE COST TAX PAYERS BILLIONS

According to a washingtonspectator.org report full time workers for corporate fast food chains are so poorly paid that more than half of them qualify for means-tested, anti-poverty assistance, such as Medicaid or food stamps. As a result tax payers fork out over $7 billion dollars a year in public assistance for that industry alone. In 2013 the fast food industry recorded over $680 billion in profits, which they were able to make as a result of paying dirt-poor wages to full time workers that we, the tax payers, subsidize through public assistance.

Yum Corporation, which includes Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut pays workers an average of $8 an hour, while tax payers kick in $650 million more in public benefits so their underpaid employees can survive.

And fast food workers are only a fraction of the full-time minimum wage employees who rely on social welfare to make ends meet. Large corporations such as Wal-Mart have been exposed in the past for similar policies. By failing to raise the minimum wage House Republicans are keeping millions of people in poverty. Failure to raise the minimum wage benefits greedy corporations at the expense of tax payers, who subsidize minimum wage employment through public subsides, like food stamps, that full time minimum wage workers need to survive.

The result is that for every dollar tax payers shell out to provide public assistance for a minimum wage employee, a dollar that should be a corporate expense for wages, instead becomes, in effect, a dollar transferred from the pocket of a hard working tax payer to money in the bank and profit for a multi-million dollar corporation.

Adding to this irony is the fact that increasing the minimum wage would not only improve the lives of millions of people, but would also be fully deductible as a business expense. The additional spending from increased income would mean better local economies through out the nation, as employees would have more money to spend, and everyone, except the corporate patrons, would be better off.

By raising the minimum wage Capital Hill could ease the budget burden. Funds saved by reducing public assistance subsidizes to minimum wage earners could be spent instead on uses such as paying down the national debt or hiring more doctors and nurses at VA hospitals.