The people who are the least well paid, are also the people who are the least
educated. These days, most of them are within cultural subgroups and they are
most interested in information about the countries from which they've
emigrated. They certainly do not read articles about economics or the US
financial system. Even our less well paid workers who were born here have been
captured by corporate media. And few people who are more comfortable
financially, care about those who are struggling financially. If people cared,
the Democratic Party couldn't get away with this stuff. They're refusing $15 an
hour drawn out over 3 years when it's obviously completely inadequate. All
these so-called Progressives are fighting for it when they know that it's
inadequate. It's all incredible hypocrisy.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, March 8, 2021 3:03 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Forget $15 an Hour - the Minimum Wage Should Be
$24
Cost of living such as minimum wage, lag behind rising costs. The folks living
on the edge of poverty are usually dipping into poverty before being lifted, if
barely, out of it.
Same is true with anyone living on a pension or SSDI. All year their costs
rise while their income stays flat. Then at some future point, they regain
some of their losses. But never the full amount. That's why we now have a
wage minimum that can't sustain a church mouse. By the time congress gets
around to "catching up", hat $15 per hour will need $30 to keep the average
worker.
I find it interesting that some of Capitalism's strongest support comes from
the lowest paid folk.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/8/21, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Forget $15 an Hour - the Minimum Wage Should Be $24 By Jon Schwarz,
The Intercept
07 March 21
The minimum wage once went up hand in hand with the productivity of
the U.S.
economy. It should again.
The coronavirus pandemic relief bill passed by the House of
Representatives this week would raise the federal minimum wage in
steps until it reached
$15
an hour in 2025. But an increase in the minimum wage has been removed
from the Senate's legislation. At least for now, it is stuck at $7.25.
This is bad enough in itself, but even worse is that almost no
Americans understand how low we've allowed our aspirations to become.
Our country's productivity gains in recent decades should have
translated into a minimum wage today of $24 an hour - and by 2025, it should
be almost $30.
This may sound preposterous. But in fact, U.S. society was once on a
path to this destination. We simply chose to step off that path.
From both a moral and practical perspective, the minimum wage should
go up in step with the productivity of the U.S. economy - that is, our
ever-increasing ability to create more wealth with the same amount of work.
Morally, as a country grows richer, everyone should share in the
increased wealth. Practically, companies that sell things need lots of
people with the money to buy them.
We know that this can work because it already did. During the 30 years
from the establishment of a minimum wage in 1938 to 1968, Congress
repeatedly upped the minimum wage so that it did in fact go up hand in hand
with U.S.
productivity. By the end of that period, it was worth the equivalent
of $12 per hour today.
Since 1968, American productivity has substantially increased. Dean
Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy
Research, points out that if the minimum wage had gone up at the same
rate, it would now be over $24. At that level, as Baker says, a couple
who both worked full time at minimum-wage jobs would take home $96,000
a year. Baker also calculates that by 2025, rising productivity would
bring the minimum wage close to $30 an hour.
But instead we've gone in the other direction. After the late 1960s,
Congress stopped raising the minimum wage in step with productivity.
Instead, over the past 50 years, Congress has allowed the minimum wage
to plummet in real terms. That is, minimum-wage workers of the past
were actually paid more than minimum-wage workers make today - even
though today's workers live in a much richer society.
Indeed, since 1950, the hourly minimum wage has almost never been
lower than it is now. Of course, 1950 is literally a lifetime ago, and
the U.S. is now a completely different country. Our per capita gross
domestic product is now four times greater. A UNIVAC computer of the
time was 38 feet long, weighed eight tons, and had about 1/1,000,000
of the memory of today's cheapest iPhone.
Yet somehow, everyone working a federal minimum-wage job in 2021 is
paid less per hour than the inflation-adjusted $8.25 or so that they
would have gotten in 1950. During the past 71 years, the
inflation-adjusted minimum wage has only been lower than it is now in 1989
and from 2004 to 2006.
The first federal minimum wage was established in 1933 with the
passage of the New Deal's National Industrial Recovery Act. It was
soon struck down as unconstitutional by the era's ultra-right Supreme
Court. President Franklin D. Roosevelt then ran for reelection in 1936
promising to keep fighting for a federal minimum wage. By contrast,
that year's Republican platform conspicuously did not call for one,
although it did piously allow that it might be okay if individual
states created minimum wages for women and children.
Roosevelt's landslide victory intimidated conservative Justice Owen
Roberts enough that he reread the Constitution and realized that in
fact it does allow the federal government to set a minimum wage. He
switched sides in a
1937 minimum-wage case, clearing the way for the passage of the Fair
Labor Standards Act in 1938.
The Fair Labor Standards Act set the minimum wage at 25 cents per hour.
Adjusted for inflation, that's about $4.60 today. Tellingly, this was
a compromise with Southern senators: The original version of the bill
would have established a minimum wage of 40 cents per hour, the
equivalent of about $7.37 now.
The minimum wage only made it to 40 cents by 1945. It then was almost
doubled when President Harry Truman signed a bill at the start of 1950
increasing it to 75 cents, worth $8.25 today after adjusting for inflation.
What happens now is unclear, but certainly the situation doesn't look
good for any significant minimum-wage changes. The Senate
parliamentarian ruled that minimum-wage provisions cannot be passed
via the budget reconciliation process, which only requires 50 votes,
and the Biden administration has refused to use its power to ignore
the parliamentarian. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has
said that the two versions will not go to conference committee to be
reconciled. Instead, the House will simply pass the Senate bill and send it
to President Joe Biden for his signature.
Democrats can now try to pass a stand-alone increase in regular order
over a GOP filibuster, but that would require all of the Democratic
senators and
10
Republicans, which is difficult to imagine. They could also change
Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster, something that seems equally
unlikely.
So for the moment, it appears that America's worst-paid workers have
been abandoned yet again by the federal government. But let's not
pretend this isn't a choice we're making. Any time we want, we can
choose to get back on the path to a different, fairer, better country.
