Letters: Earning your keep in America

Re “Raising the wage floor,” Business, Feb. 14

In answer to all who proclaim that raising the minimum wage will devastate small business, I am about to enter my 83rd turn around the sun and have seen it raised more than a few times.

Much breast-beating and bellowing about imminent disaster always follows but never happens. Somehow, our economy has and will continue to absorb such modest efforts, admittedly never sufficient for those earning it to live on but somehow enough to mollify the left and infuriate the right.

Shouldn’t a wage floor enable one to earn above the poverty line rather than live beneath it?

Norm Toback

Studio City

There’s an easy way to understand what increasing the minimum wage to $9 an hour, as President Obama has proposed, would do to the economy.

Question: Do I buy more of something when costs go down or up? I think we all know the answer, and to a business person, wages are a cost. Would he or she hire more people if it costs more or less to do so? This isn’t rocket science.

Employers and workers should be free to sign whatever contracts they want, but they can’t in America.

Rich Case

Thousand Oaks

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