Americans dread tax day. Seeing just how much the government gets to claim from your paycheck can be a tough pill to swallow. And it’s even harder for those who feel they aren’t making a livable wage.

So last week when many people were frantically trying to get everything finished and filed on time for tax day, some took to protest the current minimum wage. Many low and minimum wage workers from McDonald’s gathered in protest in New York City on April 15 because they believe that the current federal wage is not high enough to constitute a livable wage.

Federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. This rate varies from state to state, but $7.25 is the absolute lowest, legal amount an employer can pay an hourly wage employee. The majority of the workers would like the minimum wage to be raised to $15 an hour.

To a lot of people, $15 an hour sounds fantastic. However, raising the minimum wage might not actually be quite as great as it sounds. Massive layoffs and severe economic damage could occur in conjunction with the increase.

While economists have not come up with a clear picture of what would happen if the minimum wage was raised to an amount as high as $15, it is safe to say that massive job loss will occur. According to a February report from the Congressional Budget Office, “the Democratic proposal to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 would reduce total employment by 500,000 workers over the next three years.”

This is because companies only have a certain amount to spend on employee salaries. Just because the government is mandating that they pay their employees more money, does not mean that they have to keep all of their current employees in order to make that happen. According to Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, he believes that this job loss would accompany an increase in the minimum wage because, “The least skilled people in our society have more trouble getting work the higher you make the minimum wage.”

Republicans are not against allowing American citizens to make more money at their jobs. They are only against a minimum wage increase so huge that it could potentially destroy the economy. Small increases to the minimum wage, that could be up to $2.85 more than the current amount, could be a good thing as proved by a study published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, but the fact remains that most of the companies in question are private institutions, and the government shouldn’t have a hand in private business dealings.

Many hardcore conservative Republicans would argue that the minimum wage should not even exist at all because the government should not be involved in private businesses. While that is extreme, the concept of individual companies working on their own to make life better for their workers is a good idea.

In addition to job loss, increasing the minimum wage could affect business in the U.S. in others ways like reducing competition, which would be very bad for the economy. Basically, if you increase the minimum wage, companies, in addition to cutting jobs, will have to raise product prices. If businesses lose the freedom to set their prices to match their competitors, competition will surely go down. Some economists believe that this will lead to “reduced market shares, and will even bankrupt some businesses, in cases where consumers do not buy as much product due to the price increases,” according to an article from Slate.com.

The moral here is that while increasing the minimum wage may sound good in theory, the damage it could cause could far outweighs the benefits it would reap.

Victoria Razzi is a freshman magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at vcrazzi@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @vrazzi.

Published on April 19, 2015 at 10:44 pm