SPRINGFIELD - Most voters don’t think the minimum wage is enough to live on and support President Obama’s proposal to raise it from $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour, a Rasmussen poll showed this week. But in Illinois, Governor Pat Quinn wants the minimum wage to be $10 per hour.
“Nobody in Illinois should work 40 hours a week and live in poverty," Quinn said in his State of the Union address last week. "That's why, over the next four years, we must raise the minimum wage to at least $10 an hour.”
Raising the minimum wage could cost Illinois as well as business owners, one expert says.
According to Michael Miller, a DePaul professor of economonics says he expects the Democrat majority to raise Illinois' minimum wage to $10. But that mandatory wage hike will increase unemployment and endanger even more Illinois' failing economy. as a mandate by the state to increase minimum wage would leave Illinois businesses no choice but to increase prices for the consumer, decrease staff, or move out of the state to accommodate the wage increase. Raising minimum wage also makes it more difficult for low-skilled workers to find work because businesses cannot afford to hire employees who create less value than they earn.
“The people who create the new jobs are the people creating new businesses. The research on that is perfectly clear,” said Miller in a campus newspaper, The DePaulia, story. “Anything that makes it harder for businesses to start businesses makes it harder for Illinois to have new jobs.” In his proposal for increased minimum wage, Quinn is trying to help the common man, but “what he’s ignoring are the consequences. When it comes to the minimum wage (increase) most of the consequences are negative. They are almost never positive … When you raise the minimum wage, unemployment will rise.”
But a lobbying effort has sprung up and is moving the minimum wage effort forward in the Illinois legislature. The chances of Obama getting his effort through a fiscally-conservative, business-minded Republican majority in the US House diminishes the chances of the federal minimum wage going up substantially in the near future.
