How to make your poor poorer
Although Senate Republicans in Washington recently defeated an effort to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour over a two-year period, new legislation to do the same has just been reintroduced. The last raise was in 1997. I found some ironies in this so good that I just had to whip out my trusty calculator.
Here are some things I came up with: Picture a single mother of two children who works somewhere in my home state of West Virginia at $5.15 an hour, 40 hours a week year round. The hardest part to believe is the 40 hours part. She would earn $10,712 a year, or $5,378 below the federal poverty level of $16,090 for that family size. Put another way, her earnings only reach two-thirds of the poverty level.
Now look at a hypothetical right-wing member of Congress who voted down the wage increase. His or her base salary is $162,100, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The congressperson in question would probably also have additional income and sizable personal wealth, but we’ll leave that aside.
The single mom would have to work about 31,476 hours to earn what the Congress member gets in a year. That’s a little more than 15 years without overtime. By contrast, if the congressman had to work 40 hours a week year round to earn the base salary, he or she would surpass the mom’s annual salary in about three and a half weeks.
Conditions are better for the anti-worker congressperson too. Unlike Mom, the congressman in question gets regular salary increases, not to mention good health insurance and lots of vacations or recesses. By contrast, Mom usually does without health care and hasn’t seen a recess since elementary school.
As Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa said, “Since 1997, the last time we raised the minimum wage, members of Congress have raised their own pay seven times in the last eight years, by $28,500. Think about that. We vote to raise our pay seven times in eight years by $28,500, but for minimum-wage workers earning $10,700 a year, we can’t vote to raise their minimum wage. Shame on the Senate.”
So much for the Golden Rule of doing unto others as we would have them do unto us. Mom would have to work almost three years just to earn the raises enacted by Congress since the minimum wage went up last time. For that matter, she’d have to work almost eight years to earn what the richest 1 percent grabbed in President Bush’s tax giveaways last year.
To make matters worse, the minimum wage Mom earns is worth less than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. During that period, the poverty level was fairly close to the full-time minimum-wage level. However, it remained static at $3.35 from 1981 through 1990. Its value fell and never regained lost ground. In 2001, the minimum wage adjusted for inflation was 21 percent less than the minimum wage in 1979 and 27 percent less than in 1968, the year of its highest level. If the 1968 minimum wage was adjusted for inflation, it would now be worth $8.90 an hour.
The usual rationale against raising the minimum wage (aside from the real reason of wanting cheap help) goes something like this: increasing the wage would, in addition to causing the moon to turn to blood and making the stars fall from the heavens, force employers to lay off low-wage workers, i.e. hurt the very people it is intended to help.
In other words, trying to help these people only hurts them, and the best way to help them is to really stick it to them, which is pretty much what is happening now.
This must explain why it’s so great to be among the working poor these days.
If this argument sounds old, it is. In the early days of the 20th century, many industrialists argued that abolishing child labor in sweatshops would only hurt children. The Pharaoh in Exodus probably said the same thing about letting the children of Israel go.
The problem with that argument in the case of raising the minimum wage is that it doesn’t work. In 1996, when the last increase was being debated, opponents said that it would cost between 100,000 and 625,000 jobs.
According to Terence Samuel, chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report and a columnist for The American Prospect Online: “In 1997, the non-farm economy created more than 3 million new jobs, unemployment was at its lowest rate in 28 years, the gross domestic product expanded by 3.8 percent, and the growth in earnings took off. In addition, real average hourly earnings saw their largest increases in 21 years.”
If that was the end of the world, can we have some more?
Most Americans realize that workers need purchasing power if our economy is going to run. In several public opinion polls conducted over the last four years, around 80 percent of Americans favored raising the minimum wage. Making work pay is good policy as well as good politics.
If most Americans can figure that out, why can’t the current ruling clique?
LINK
Although Senate Republicans in Washington recently defeated an effort to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour over a two-year period, new legislation to do the same has just been reintroduced. The last raise was in 1997. I found some ironies in this so good that I just had to whip out my trusty calculator.
Here are some things I came up with: Picture a single mother of two children who works somewhere in my home state of West Virginia at $5.15 an hour, 40 hours a week year round. The hardest part to believe is the 40 hours part. She would earn $10,712 a year, or $5,378 below the federal poverty level of $16,090 for that family size. Put another way, her earnings only reach two-thirds of the poverty level.
Now look at a hypothetical right-wing member of Congress who voted down the wage increase. His or her base salary is $162,100, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The congressperson in question would probably also have additional income and sizable personal wealth, but we’ll leave that aside.
The single mom would have to work about 31,476 hours to earn what the Congress member gets in a year. That’s a little more than 15 years without overtime. By contrast, if the congressman had to work 40 hours a week year round to earn the base salary, he or she would surpass the mom’s annual salary in about three and a half weeks.
Conditions are better for the anti-worker congressperson too. Unlike Mom, the congressman in question gets regular salary increases, not to mention good health insurance and lots of vacations or recesses. By contrast, Mom usually does without health care and hasn’t seen a recess since elementary school.
As Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa said, “Since 1997, the last time we raised the minimum wage, members of Congress have raised their own pay seven times in the last eight years, by $28,500. Think about that. We vote to raise our pay seven times in eight years by $28,500, but for minimum-wage workers earning $10,700 a year, we can’t vote to raise their minimum wage. Shame on the Senate.”
So much for the Golden Rule of doing unto others as we would have them do unto us. Mom would have to work almost three years just to earn the raises enacted by Congress since the minimum wage went up last time. For that matter, she’d have to work almost eight years to earn what the richest 1 percent grabbed in President Bush’s tax giveaways last year.
To make matters worse, the minimum wage Mom earns is worth less than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. During that period, the poverty level was fairly close to the full-time minimum-wage level. However, it remained static at $3.35 from 1981 through 1990. Its value fell and never regained lost ground. In 2001, the minimum wage adjusted for inflation was 21 percent less than the minimum wage in 1979 and 27 percent less than in 1968, the year of its highest level. If the 1968 minimum wage was adjusted for inflation, it would now be worth $8.90 an hour.
The usual rationale against raising the minimum wage (aside from the real reason of wanting cheap help) goes something like this: increasing the wage would, in addition to causing the moon to turn to blood and making the stars fall from the heavens, force employers to lay off low-wage workers, i.e. hurt the very people it is intended to help.
In other words, trying to help these people only hurts them, and the best way to help them is to really stick it to them, which is pretty much what is happening now.
This must explain why it’s so great to be among the working poor these days.
If this argument sounds old, it is. In the early days of the 20th century, many industrialists argued that abolishing child labor in sweatshops would only hurt children. The Pharaoh in Exodus probably said the same thing about letting the children of Israel go.
The problem with that argument in the case of raising the minimum wage is that it doesn’t work. In 1996, when the last increase was being debated, opponents said that it would cost between 100,000 and 625,000 jobs.
According to Terence Samuel, chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report and a columnist for The American Prospect Online: “In 1997, the non-farm economy created more than 3 million new jobs, unemployment was at its lowest rate in 28 years, the gross domestic product expanded by 3.8 percent, and the growth in earnings took off. In addition, real average hourly earnings saw their largest increases in 21 years.”
If that was the end of the world, can we have some more?
Most Americans realize that workers need purchasing power if our economy is going to run. In several public opinion polls conducted over the last four years, around 80 percent of Americans favored raising the minimum wage. Making work pay is good policy as well as good politics.
If most Americans can figure that out, why can’t the current ruling clique?
LINK
