LOUISVILLE, Ky. - To Micheshia Norment, a Louisvillian who's faced struggles while in the workforce, raising the minimum wage rate in Kentucky from $7.25 would be a good thing.

There are two bills that have been pre-filed, to do that; over seven years, the rate would gradually rise to $15 per hour, starting with an $8.20 per hour rate in July 2020.

Norment has worked several jobs. The single mother managed to make ends meet while earning $10 per hour as a security guard at Fourth Street Live, and earning $9 per hour at a Taco Bell. Even then, she made more than the minimum rate.

"It was real hard, but I think I made ends meet the best I could. Sometimes I had to wait to the next pay period to pay other bills," Norment explains."Often, I ran out of gas because my check was already gone."

However beneficial to the individual employee $15 an hour could be, one economics expert calls the idea "drastic." UofL Associate Economics Professor Jose Fernandez says someone would have to pay for the increase, whether it be the consumer of goods and services in higher prices passed on from the wage raise, or in companies cutting the number of jobs.

"That would be highly disruptive to our labor market," says Fernandez. "Consider that currently, the median wage in Kentucky is about $16 an hour, a little bit more than that. So, to go all the way up to $15 would mean that you're giving about 50% of the population a pay bump," he says.

Fernandez has experienced strong opinions on the topic of wage raises. He says surveys conducted by his department at the university show that people favored higher minimum wage, even in the scenario it could force more people into unemployment. Kentucky's minimum wage matches the federal minimum wage, which hasn't changed since 2009.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 58.5% of all wage and salary workers in the country were paid hourly rates in 2018, and 434,000 of them made exactly the minimum wage. About 1.3 million people made below that rate.