Reads the USA Today headline by Kim Hjelmgaard, telling us something that a lot of us have suspected for some time. In the first paragraph she puts it another way, that the combined wealth of the world’s 85 richest people is equivalent to that owned by the bottom half of the world’s population.
Think about that a minute. 85 people versus 3 billion. Billion. That’s nuts. The Rush’s of the world can spin it however they want, but that stat is crazy bad. The establishment Republicans can fast talk all they want, but something is seriously wrong. Unrelated to this specific article, but everything to do with this general topic, is a website I heard about last week called Higher Wages dot org by a fellow named Ron Unz.
Jan Mickelson of WHO Radio 1040 am screwed up last week and talked about something relevant. If during the interview he had shut up and let Ron Unz talk some of the time it would have been better, but what the heck, we get what we get. I did get the website and a few facts Ron was able to squeeze in.
$12 an hour, that’s what the minimum wage should be he argued. I believe it. He made the excellent point that at that wage rate, $24,000 a year, all of a sudden mass amounts of people start dropping off the welfare roles. Earned Income Tax credit (EITC), food stamps, housing assistance, WIC, and a host of others that taxpayers pay to welfare recipients to the tune of $250,000,000,000 a year. Billion, with a b. Can you believe that?
We subsidize American business $250 billion a year because they don’t want to pay a living wage. You got to be able to grasp that. The poverty level, $24 thousand a year is what people need to live on. They are going to get $24 K one way or another. Either through the current $7.25 an hour ($14,500 a year) and welfare from the taxpayer, or the damned employer can pay $12 an hour. You got to be able to grasp that, we have been subsidizing employers. They have not been paying a living wage.
I’m not even talking about the direct subsidies we have been paying to oil companies and farmers, I’m talking about the way we have been letting employers off the hook, by not making them pay a living wage. If you can’t afford to pay a living wage, you don’t have a business, you have welfare.
$12 an hour solves a myriad of other problems too. Illegal immigration. Cheapskate employers aren’t going to be falling all over themselves to hire illegals when they have to pay $12 an hour. It ain’t worth it then. They’ll pay to get the somewhat educated American who is at least conversant in English. Because guess what? At $12 bucks an hour, all of a sudden those jobs “Americans” won’t do anymore, start getting done.
Crime, working the system, sloth, start to fall by the way side. All of a sudden there is a point to working a job and a half for $36,000 a year. It didn’t make sense at $7.25, that only got you $21,000 a year. Your going to bust your butt at 60 hours a week for $21 K? I don’t think so. But a person who wants to get ahead might see a point to working 60 hours a week at $12 an hour.
Constant war. Our “all volunteer” force these past 42 years have done so in large part out of necessity. Those volunteers do it a lot of time because the military has some of the best pay around for the blue collar guy. Top that off with college benefits and retirement pay, and it was some of the most attractive employment around. You don’t think our leaders ground the economy into the dirt for no reason do you? You’ll never have suckers willing to go die in your stupid wars with a hot economy, you’d have to have a draft then. But the way they have been playing it, shipping all the good jobs overseas, and flooding the country with illegals, and a despicable minimum wage, you keep the “volunteers” coming. (With a draft, all of a sudden war gets ugly again. When important peoples sons get to go die, all of a sudden these constant foreign incursions get a lot less cute.)
The bottom line is, you start making business pay the wage, instead of the taxpayer, and the whole current corrupt system collapses. People might even wake up to the stupidity of us working folks subsidizing millionaire farmers and billion dollar oil companies. Shoot, they might even look at the cap on SSA earnings. Who knows, the people might even get wise to the game where we have been bailing out the banks the last 100 years. Okay, probably not, but it would be nice.
Jim Roach
