US Should Raise Minimum Wage to Fight Spread of Poverty - Advocacy Group

Oxfam America Senior Domestic Policy Advisor Jeffrey Buchanan claims that the US government should raise the national minimum wage to fight growing poverty across the United States.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The US government should raise the national minimum wage to fight growing poverty across the United States, Oxfam America Senior Domestic Policy Advisor Jeffrey Buchanan told Sputnik.

"If we want to address the federal poverty rate as it exists today, we need to increase wages, starting by raising the federal minimum wage," Buchanan said on Wednesday. "Surely the United States can do more to address poverty."

On August 26, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson told CNN the United States had ten times more people on welfare, in poverty, broken homes and in crime than there had been in the mid-1960s, despite federal expenditures of $19 trillion to combat these problems.

However, Buchanan insisted that the US federal programs reduced suffering among the poor and did not cause or add to their problems.

"The official US poverty numbers fail to capture how anti-poverty programs like food stamps, the earned income tax credit, and social security impact family budgets and supplement market incomes," Buchanan said.

The US Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure documented the positive impact of federal government social programs on impoverished families’ budgets and their role in helping millions of people get out of poverty, Buchanan stated.