Many Lafayette students will get out of high school and start living on their own and will have to survive off the minimum wage, but many people consider the national minimum wages to be far too low to survive on; One of these such people is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Bernie Sanders has spent some time in Kentucky recently to protest for a raise in minimum wage.  You may be wondering why Bernie is taking his fight to Kentucky specifically and the reason for that is, according to Sanders and multiple other left leaning politicians and activists, Mitch McConnell (the senator of Kentucky) is the main leading force against raising the minimum wage. 

The facts are that, around July, the House of Representatives passed a bill to raise the minimum wage by 2025 but that senate are yet to vote on it. The sole reason this bill hasn’t been discussed among the senate yet is because Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is refusing to take up the bill. Sen. Mitch McConnell explained why in this tweet from July 18th “Research shows that hiking the minimum wage to $15 would kill jobs and depress the economy at a time when it’s thriving for the American people. We are not going to be taking that up in the Senate.” along with a video of an interview from fox news explaining further. Keep in mind that no research was given along with the tweet.  

There are many pros and cons to this situation, and we don’t know if the raise in minimum wage would affect job rates like Sen. McConnell says but if the house passed the bills then it is inevitable that the bill will, at some point, go through congress for better or for worse. Regardless, Lafayette students will be affected. If Sen. Mitch McConnell is correct in his assumption, then Lafayette students will have a hard time finding a job out of college or high school which will affect living conditions for young adults. On the other hand, if Sen. McConnell is wrong and the job rate isn’t severely affected then not only will Lafayette students be getting paid more in general, but it would also directly affect the school positively. Lafayette doesn’t have much money in general to keep the facilities running but if students suddenly make more money in general then the schools is bound to get more donations.