By Graison Dangor, National Public Radio, January 8, 2020
A new study suggests that raising the minimum wage might lower the suicide rate — especially when unemployment is high — and that doing so might have saved tens of thousands of people from dying by suicide in the last quarter century.
The minimum federal minimum wage is $7.25, though many states have set it higher. Between 1990 and 2015, raising the minimum wage by $1 in each state might have saved more than 27,000 lives, according to a report published this week in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. An increase of $2 in each state's minimum wage could have prevented more than 57,000 suicides.
"This is a way that you can, it seems, improve the well-being of people working at lower-wage jobs and their dependents," says John Kaufman, the lead author on the study and an epidemiology doctoral student at Emory University.
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