Raising The Minimum Wage Is A Reasonable Way To Reduce The Budget Deficit

The Republicans seem to continually whine that the federal government is too deeply in debt, and needs to cut the budget deficit. I don't think they're very serious about that, because they are the ones that took a budget surplus left by the last Democratic president, and turned it into a huge budget deficit. And they are continually refusing to make legitimate policy adjustments that would reduce the budget deficit -- things like cutting our bloated military budget, or raising taxes a small amount on the richest Americans (many of whom pay a smaller percentage than the middle class) or corporations (many of whom pay no taxes at all).

They act like they can balance the budget on the backs of children, seniors, the poor, and the unemployed -- simply by cutting funding for these already hurting Americans. The crazy part is that they could legitimately cut spending on social programs without hurting anyone by doing one simple thing -- raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour or more.

That one act alone would save billions in social program costs, and it would do that without hurting businesses (who would benefit from all the extra money flowing through the economy increasing their sales and profits). That act would save a couple of billion dollars in Wal-Mart employees alone, so you can imagine the many billions it would save in the economy at large.

It would be the reasonable way to reduce the budget by reducing social spending (because most of the poor who receive government help are working full-time -- but are underpaid for that work). But reasonable is not in the Republican vocabulary. They want to cut that spending by hurting those who cannot afford more misery.

This is just one more reason, among many, why the GOP must be voted out of power in 2014.