With soaring housing costs, rising gas prices, and inflation rising through the roof, many underprivileged residents in Utah are finding it to be impossible to be self-sufficient. You might ask, how is it possible that one cannot be self-sufficient? Doesn’t the government prevent that from happening? The simple answer is, not anymore. “The minimum wage was designed to create a minimum standard of living to protect the health and well-being of employees,” (Cornell Law) but in Utah, it seems that the state lawmakers do not care about the well-being of its constituents.
A minimum wage employee working 60 hours a week makes approximately $435 a week, a sad $1740 a month. With an average rent cost of about $1400 a month in Salt Lake County (Deseret News), that leaves about $340 left for one’s food costs, transportation expenses, medical expenses, insurance costs, etc. If a person working about 9 hours every single day of the week can’t afford the basic needs of life, how can Utah state lawmakers blatantly ignore the need for a higher minimum wage? Maybe they don’t care, maybe it doesn’t affect them, but at the end of the day, something needs to be done.
Utah state lawmakers need to take immediate action so that our state can succeed and so that we can close the pay gap. The minimum wage in Utah should reflect a wage that allows for someone working full time to afford all of the basic essentials in life without government assistance. Raising the minimum is not simple, but the bottom line is that it should be entirely possible for any person in Utah to become entirely self-sufficient, and state lawmakers should take any action necessary to make this happen.
Jaxon Davis, Murray
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