Candidates such as Ryan Hall and Cathy Glasson advocate for raising the minimum wage in an effort to lift people out of poverty. What they don’t tell you is that this plan does not work.

Raising the minimum wage will fail to lift the working poor out of poverty, and it will negatively affect the working poor in our communities. Analysts from American University and Cornell University found that past wage increases had no effect on state poverty rates and the working poor faced a higher share of job losses.

Seattle recently raised its minimum wage and researchers from the University of Washington found that the wage increase to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs around 9 percent and led to lower payroll, reducing low-wage employees’ earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016.

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We need real effective solutions to lift people out of poverty. For instance, tax reform would be a good place to start, considering there are ample outdated loopholes in the current tax code. We also need to end the cycle of corporate welfare, where we are losing hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits to huge companies such as MidAmerican and Facebook.

After saving millions of dollars from these reforms, consider investing more money in programs such as the Earned-Income Tax Credit. The credit has proven to successfully lift millions of Americans out of poverty every single year. According to the IRS, such working-family tax credits lifted 9.4 million people out of poverty in 2013, including 5 million children, and made 22 million other people less poor.

Vote for candidates who will advocate for effective change, not for candidates such as Hall, who only bring a list of failed talking points, like raising the minimum wage, and show glaring inexperience.

— Caleb Bell

University of Iowa

B.A. Political Science