Raising minimum wage to $15

We should not raise minimum wage to $15. It will cause more harm than benefits. People who are working jobs that pay minimum wage are often young and inexperienced. "And many who make minimum wage are unskilled, he said. If they can't be hired for less than $9.80 an hour, then they might not get a job that "would allow them to develop the skills they desperately need."' (Brian Baugus) Businesses can't afford to pay those types of positions that much money. In order to pay that much more "...businesses will have to offset the financial hit by taking on more work themselves and "may be less able to invest in future job growth," Wagner said." They will also have to cut workers' hours and have layoffs. From the perspective of a small business, this could be detrimental. The entire business could go under if they only have a few employees. "An employer who has 20 employees making minimum wage will see a $10,000 annual increase in wage costs for every 25 cents the minimum pay is raised, according to the Employment Policies Institute. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce website, small businesses are least able to absorb the thousands of dollars in additional labor costs that a minimum wage increase creates. Some solutions that small businesses can employ include reducing staff or cutting costs in other areas such as marketing.

Corporations, on the other hand, could benefit as a whole but the employees would suffer. They could easily cut jobs, replace them with technology, and those jobs would never come back. "What would you do? If you said a), Congratulations! You are a very nice person. Unfortunately, your restaurant will soon go bankrupt, everybody will lose their jobs, and you will lose your life savings. Why did that happen to a great person like you? Because in order to pay the higher wages, you had to increase prices. And when you increased prices, all of your customers started going to a nearby restaurant that elected to get more efficient instead of raising prices. With no customers, you went broke. Sorry!....Unfortunately for the low-skilled workers (bussers and dish-washers), the most vulnerable workers, they all lost their jobs. And to kick them while they’re down, they are the ones who will have the hardest time finding new jobs since they have few skills, and the fact that they can’t legally make less that $20/hour makes it even harder still for them to find jobs."

Minimum wage also only affects a relatively small group of people - "Gary Wagner, an economics professor at Old Dominion University, points out that the vast majority of workers make above minimum wage. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 73.9 million American workers above the age of 16 were paid hourly, and among those, 1.7 million earned $7.25 an hour, while 2.2 million made below."

"The minimum wage covers a huge number of workers, but not that many people actually earn minimum wage," he said." Because of the low number of people, different options should be explored to address the poverty issue. 

http://insidebiz.com/news/raising-minimum-wage-has-downside
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/raising-minimum-wages-hurts-us-employers-11744.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/02/20/why-shouldnt-we-increase-the-minimum-wage-to-20hour/