Please write a personal note to President Obama, urging him to raise the minimum wage to at least $10/hour.

For example, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream pays their manufacturing workers a livable wage based on the actual cost of living in Vermont. "Every year, we recalculate the livable wage to make sure it’s keeping up with the actual cost of living in Vermont. In recent years, Ben & Jerry’s livable wage has been more than twice the national minimum wage, landing at $13.25 in 2008."

Based on that alone, raising the federal minimum wage to $10/hour is not too much to ask.


Here is my personal letter as general template:

President Obama,

Thank you for your administration's commitment to middle class and lower-income communities, particularly Vice Pres. Biden's Middle Class Task Force. Encouraging a robust, productive middle class while aggressively addressing poverty should be our chief goal as a country in the midst of this recession, after years of disregard and deregulation that have left many of us unemployed, underemployed, unable to afford higher education, unable to afford health care, or worse, homeless.

This is why I am asking you to raise the minimum wage to $10/hour in the United States. The minimum wage right now is insulting and we all know that working a minimum wage full-time job does not cover all, or even most, living expenses.

I make $8/hour and live frugally but I still cannot cover living expenses. Most painful of all, I cannot afford to continue my education. I was forced to withdraw from my university after 2 1/2 years because of financial issues and have not been able to return to college yet.

Costs of living have soared over the past two decades, but American wages have been stagnant. If I lived in Maine, I would need to make $17/hour to live securely. In some states the living wage is as high as $40/hour, like Alaska. Raising the federal minimum wage to $10/hour, after looking at these statistics, is the least we could do.

If people are paid a realistic living wage, it would decrease health care costs, the amount of homeless and food insecure citizens, increase college enrollment (because people would have a higher chance of being able to afford it), and allow us to positively contribute to society, or even, dare I say, pursue our dreams.

We cannot excel as a country if our citizens can barely afford the basic necessities of life because we continue to pay a minimum wage that is downright criminal. Please raise the federal minimum wage to $10/hour.