Matthew Walsh 30 Days Living at Minimum Wage

2) Budgeting played a huge role in the survival of Alex and Morgan during their 1 month of living on minimum wage because it allowed them to get food and shelter, what they needed to survive. Minimum wage is only $7.25/hour and as mentioned in the video, sometimes people on minimum wage don’t even get that much, because they are expected to get tips from customers in jobs like working at a cafe. This in addition to needing money for food and shelter makes living at minimum wage very difficult as money starts running short. They needed to plan what their apartment costed, what their electricity costed, and they needed to budget what their food would cost and what it would be. In addition they accumulated medical costs over the course of the month. They tried to budget as much as they could but the medical bills that they got at the end of the month, just from going into the emergency room twice, totaled at around $1,000, which they mentioned would take almost 3 months to pay off. This makes budgeting even more important. There was even an argument part of the way through the month, when they went to the movies, about how Morgan was spending too much money on the children and how they should be spending less and budgeting more. All of this shows the importance and stress put on budgeting during their 30 days. This stress was caused by the fact that they needed food and shelter to survive for the one month.

7) I don’t agree with Senator Ted Kennedy’s argument to raise minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage only helps families if they don’t lose their jobs because of it. If the minimum wage is increased companies are just going to start firing people because either they don’t have the profit to support those people, or they would lose too much of their profit on paying said people. A company's first priority is to their investors not to improving the situation of their employees. It should not be expected that companies will willingly take on a minimum wage raise without massive employee cuts. While a low minimum wage may not seem to help the working poor, or those who are earning minimum wage and are constantly working but fall below the poverty line, it can because it provides them with jobs that pay money instead of unemployment which pays nothing. There is an argument for a higher minimum wage though. A higher minimum wage would allow families to have a much better quality of life and they wouldn’t have to live paycheck to paycheck, and they would become less dependent on others to survive. This itself could help people get more money and therefore spend more money for companies to get and they themselves spend. But overall a much better strategy to help the poor is to allow them to actually get jobs and have a lower minimum wage, freeing up companies money, and support themselves instead of having no money or income at all.