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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.
We can learn from Paragraph 5 that__________.
选项 A、many American workers are in a desperate situation
B、federal policies are designed to lift people out of poverty
C、American workers literally earn more than their grandparents
D、American workers had to take out a loan to cover their bills
答案 A
解析 由题干信息Paragraph 5定位至第五段。第五段首句为主题句：But many do.此处do承接上段末句“no one who works 40 hours a week in America should still live below the poverty line．”，补充完整即But many live below the poverty line(但是很多人都生活于贫困之中)。从第二句开始列举大量数字，来论证第一句。由具体数据可知美国劳动者很难维持生计，故选项[A]为正确答案。
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