How can we help struggling families? Increase the minimum wage.

Wages are stuck. For low-wage workers, housing, energy, and transportation are becoming increasingly unaffordable. Forget about education or saving for the future.

What can be done?

Raising Maryland's minimum wage would help a lot.

MBTPI supports Maryland’s minimum legislation to increase Maryland’s minimum wage gradually to $10 per hour. Maryland’s minimum wage is currently just $7.25 per hour, or roughly $15,000 per year for a full-time worker. For tipped workers, like restaurant servers, the minimum wage is $3.63 per hour.   Nineteen states – and the neighboring District of Columbia – have minimum wages that are higher than $7.25 per hour. If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation over the last 40 years, it would be over $10.60 per hour today.

Business interests always assert that raising the minimum wage will reduce employment. Actually, this is one of the most studied questions in economics. And the overwhelming result is that minimum wage increases have little or no effect on employment growth. It turns out that a modest increase in wages for the lowest paid employees has a very small effect on overall costs. And the business recovers some of the cost through reduced turnover expenses.

The state's economy as a whole benefits, as the added wages get recycled into other purposes.The Economic Policy Institute estimates that increasing the minimum wage would raise pay for more than 536,000 working Marylanders and it will inject approximately $492 million into Maryland’s economy, stimulating over 4,000 jobs.

Maryland should enact measures to begin increasing minimum wages in 2014.