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  3. The country’s very low minimum wage comes at a high cost. And for taxpayers, it adds up to more than $100 billion a year. Th

The country’s very low minimum wage comes at a high cost. And for taxpayers, it adds up to more than $100 billion a year. Th

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问题     The country’s very low minimum wage comes at a high cost. And for taxpayers, it adds up to more than $100 billion a year.
    That number comes from a new analysis of safety-net usage by Ken Jacobs of UC Berkeley’s Labor Center. It identifies working families with at least one member who would get a raise if the federal minimum wage were lifted to $15 an hour, and finds that the government spends about $107 billion a year on Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), cash welfare, food stamps, and the earned-income tax credit for those families.
    Raising the minimum wage would not just help them escape poverty. It would also help the government’s bottom line, by freeing up resources to spend on other anti-poverty priorities, such as child care, housing subsidies, and homelessness-prevention initiatives.
    This research comes as the new administration vows to more than double the federal minimum wage, to $15. Last week, President Joe Biden said Democrats’ winning control of the Senate would "raise the odds of prompt action," adding that "no one who works 40 hours a week in America should still live below the poverty line."
    But many do. Pull-time workers making the federal minimum wage bring home just $15,080 a year; all in all, 11 percent of American workers earn poverty wages. This is a straightforward product of federal policies, a chosen technocratic outcome. The federal minimum wage has languished at a measly $7.25 an hour since 2009. That leaves it roughly one-third lower than it was in 1968, in inflation-adjusted terms, despite the fact that the country is now much richer and the economy far bigger. The Economic Policy Institute has estimated that workers earning the minimum wage make $7,000 less each year than their grandparents did half a century ago, in real terms.
    Some argue that the government is subsidizing poverty wages through its working-family benefit programs—padding the bottom lines of fast-food franchises and big-box stores, while also helping financially stressed workers. Jacobs pushed back on that point; the earned-income tax credit does act as a straightforward wage subsidy, he said, but the evidence is unclear when it comes to other programs.
    Still, millions of workers are employed in jobs unremunerative enough that government assistance is necessary just to get by. A low minimum wage—combined with weak mandates for companies to offer benefits and paid leave, and regulations that make unionization difficult— benefits low-wage employers at the expense of both workers and taxpayers.
    To help folks stand on their own two feet, the government can’t just make people work. It has to make work pay. The cost of low wages is too high for the country’s working families. And it’s too high for Uncle Sam as well.
The analysis by Ken Jacobs suggests that__________.
选项 A、federal minimum wage are generous enough
B、working families are easy to make ends meet
C、the government has a huge burden in aiding poor families
D、federal government has lifted minimum wage to $15 an hour
答案 C
解析 由题干关键词analysis和Ken Jacobs定位至第二段第一句。但该句只是指明数据来源，并未对具体内容进行说明，故需要往后阅读，根据第二段第二句“这项分析指出，如果联邦最低工资标准提高到每小时15美元，工薪家庭至少有一名成员将获得加薪。分析发现政府每年在医疗补助计划、儿童医疗保险计划、现金福利、食物券以及对受助家庭的劳动所得税抵免上花费约1070亿美元”可知，选项[C]中huge burden对应原文中提到的1070亿美元，选项中aiding poor families对应原文中所列举的医疗补助计划、儿童医疗保险计划、现金福利、食物券以及对受助家庭的劳动所得税抵免，因此答案为选项[C]。
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