Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

So If I am reading this BLS stuff correctly using minimum wages adjusted to equal what it would be in 2006 dollars the purchasing value of the minimum wage is lower than any time since before 1950 and is $4.21 lower than it was in 1968.

Year - Minimum wage in real 2006 $
1950 - $6.33
1968 - $9.36
1997 - $6.53
2006 - $5.15

Now if had risen at the average rate of CEO pay if would be $23.00+.

So the lazy minimum wage earning hippies in 1968 were making 181 percent of the minimum wage of the good Republican blue collar worker does today.

Hey, I get it. The average woman's wage is 82% of the average man's, so to earn the same minimum wage as 1968 now takes a man=100% and a woman=82% sums to 182 % or just 1 percentage point over the 181% that the man would have earned in 1968. Now I know why it takes two people to support the same level of poverty that used to take one.

They only real question I have is why the peasants haven't burned the Manor House down yet?
 

You know what will happen if minimum wages are raised? More and more people will be put on part-time status without benefits or hired out as contract labor.

It makes me want to scream.

I'm glad to see Wal-Mart's experiment in Florida offering generic prescriptions for $4 each. Target has followed along. Let's hope they go ahead and roll this program out nationally.

This is a hot-button issue for me personally. I think I better go back to my own blog.
 

Because the peasants are duped. Read "What's the Matter with Kansas.' It explains it very thoroughly. Rank-and-file righties vote for Repub candidates in hopes that they will be socially conservative, and all they get is pro-big-business, anti-safety net defense of rapacious capitalism at all costs. They've been duped. Yet they worship the current Dupe in Chief because he ays all the *right* words!

Trixie: Then I revise and extend my remarks: Raise the minimum wage, quit worshiping the damn ghost of Adam Smith, and regulate the way businesses can treat employees, for the sake of the commonwealth. The free market is a sham. It takes government -- either state or federal -- to keep it moral. I guess I *am* a shameless lib.

Drlobojo: The next liberal president better have a Prezmobile, like the popemobile, because the rabid right-wingers will do him, and those of us of like stripe, actual harm. G. Gordon Liddy, for one, should be kept an eye on for sure.
 

Say, did you know that minmum wage doesn't apply to several million working Americans?
Next time you are served by the average waiter or waitress remember that they are being paid about $2.10 per hour plus tips, and their tips are pre-taxed at 25% (so tip in cash please). (oh, and in some high class restraunts the wait staff have to kick back 10-25% of tips to keep their jobs and get paid no salaries)

Also by the basic logic of "raising minimum wage just raises cost" wouldn't it be better if we just lowered everybody's salaries and then things would be cheaper, because...Why?

If you by a GM car you pay $1,500 for the GM worker's and retiree's health care in the cost of the car.
If you buy a Toyota you don't. the difference for Toyota is generally profit not lower cost to the consumer or higher wages or benifits to workers. There is more than wages to the equation of cost and benifit.

How much for example would it cost America to raise the minimum wage to the $9.36 level versus the $500,000,000,000 we have spent on the Iraq War so far? Projections are that the Iraq War will cost
$1,500,000,000,000 before it is over. That cost would equal the difference between current minimum wage and the $9.36 1968 minimum wage of 44,536,817 man/years of work at minimum wage. Let's say that 10 million people actually fall under minimum wage, then the cost of the war could have raised their minimum wage to the $9.36 level for the next 5 years or so. All of that money would have been spent at the local WalMart to boot.
And keep in mind the actual proposed raise is less than that. At the proposed raise the cost of the war would pay for 20 years of minimum wage increase.

But alas we will already pay that amount to cover the Iraq war and will not reap the benifits of an increased minimum wage. Excellent public policy I must say. I want to thank my Republican friends for their help in accomplishing this.
 

It's not just people like waiters and waitresses who don't make close to minimum wage. People (like me) who are "self employed" as independent professionals on a contract basis are paid by the piece, so to speak. If you look at what I am paid just on the surface it's a small number for the hours of work. Now, subtract self-employment tax and Social Security, which come out of my pocket, and every bit of my expenses -- my equipment and supplies, my utilities and the cost of maintaining a space to work in, my car. Now remember I have no health or life insurance (not part of a group and rejected for an individual policy, which I could not afford anyway.)

Why does this continue? Because the company that I most often work for gets a great deal in this bargain and isn't willing to change it. And because of the nature of the business, I would have to move out of state and give up my home and my life here to work for a competing company.

So when something bad happens to my car, or the roof needs to be replaced, I'll be SOL. God forbid I have a health crisis.
 

Ditto, except that 70% of my retirement income is fixed income and won't change, ever. No COLAs no inflation factors, nada. Today I am doing OK. Tomarrow and tomarrow, I will eventually attain the poverty catagory. So I'll sit here and watch health care double at twice the rate of everything else, defer matainance on the house until my wife who is still working can pay for it, and pour Casite Motor Honey into my 1983 Chevy pickup to keep it going a few more miles and cost still go up when the bulk part of my income doesn't budge.
But still, I don't want to live in an America that that is unfair and inequitable to those who labor for their bread. And I don't want to have learn Spanish, Again! Thus I support the minimum wage increase.

It is the CEOs, the CFOs, and the Trustees and Corporate Boards that have to "Come to Jesus" on this. They are sacrificing their own future and squandering the future profits of their stock holders for short term gains. Their "Gated Communities" are not proof against the failure of the future.

As for the slave labor "wages" that Trixie has spoken about, that Unamed Industry has the largest top to bottom disparities of all those in America and the Oklahoma branch is the absolute worse in the Nation. Short of revolution, don't know no fix for that.

Beware the Fourth Turning, and stay out of its way.
 

I recommend Nickel and Dimed (on Not Getting By in America) by Barara Ehrenreich. (2001, A Metropolitan Book). There's a lot of hooey in the book, but some good points as well. Ehrenreich, a journalist, took some time away from her job to "go underground" as a minimum-wage employee working a variety of jobs from waitressing to maid. It's a good thing this poor girl had a real job to go back to because she had zero survival instinct and didn't have a clue about how people can really live on next to zero dollars. I'm glad I grew up near poverty and learned how to cope when I was young. I certainly don't have it as bad as many who didn't have a more prosperous time in their lives where they could put assets in place, like funding a 401K (at least to some extent) and paying off a house so at least there would be a place to live. But until there is a dramatic change, I can't feel confident about my own future.

Uh-oh... I'm feeling a revolution coming on... WATCH OUT!
 

And the righties are disgruntled because for all the hope they put in this president, and the GOP in general, to advance their con-con-neocon social causes, it's not happening, for the most part, because the most powerful people in the GOP really don't *care* for social conservatives, just their votes in continued support of the very rich, who laugh all the way to the dang bank every election day -- and that colors everything else.

They've let right-wing rhetoricians scare them with the A-bomb and the H-bomb (abortion and homosexuality) to keep them from voting with the party that historically, and to this day, does more for everyday people in this country.

Voting for a Dem will no more "advance the homosexual agenda" than voting for a Repub will bring a balanced budget.

Voting for a Dem is a vote for the status quo on abortion -- but they don't want that, even though most Americans appear to want things left as they are.

And they can't have *that* when they could have an officeholder who would say all the right things against abortion, but not do a dang thing about it -- and continue voting against their economic and actual family interests.

It's plumb crazy.
 

Don't forget that a big chunk of taxes comes out of all of those salaries, to fund the gluttons in our congress and senate. Those folks apparently find it just fine to make a career of something intended by our forefathers to be a temporary, voluntary position. They have no qualms against voting pay raises for themselves, have their own health care plan, and are more than happy to push through special interest causes for their paying constituency. While we can blame the president, and CEOs, and other factors, we ultimately have the power to vote out the people with the greatest power. Even if the changes aren't immediate, at least things could be shaken up! Vote or die!
 

Hark ye to President DrL:

It is the CEOs, the CFOs, and the Trustees and Corporate Boards that have to "Come to Jesus" on this. They are sacrificing their own future and squandering the future profits of their stock holders for short term gains. Their "Gated Communities" are not proof against the failure of the future.

Well, consider it a variety of the Tragedy of the Commons: even if higher overall wages would benefit society through, say, higher aggregate demand and/or individual savings (I dont know nothin bout no eeknomick justice), if a company unilaterally pays higher wages it accrues all the costs but only a tiny portion of the presumed benefits. Even applies to the John Spruce Society wage-benefit practices, since it apparently stiffs even its CEO.

And not like you'll get any social-conscious bias on the consuming end. I'll bet you that the downtrodden themselves would over time choose lower prices on even discretionary stuff rather than make a sacrifice in the name of class solidarity. Better two cups of Folgers than one of fair market organic coffee or whatever.
 

Re, " ... the downtrodden themselves would over time choose lower prices on even discretionary stuff rather than make a sacrifice in the name of class solidarity."

THAT's the secret of Wal-Mart. Money, in this case, savings, talks. Bullshit walks. As usual.

The Tragedy of Bentonville?
 

Hell let's not trash WalMart they are the epitome of the mixed American blessing. The trick to a better economy is to increase the spending power of the mode. It is better to create a thousand salaries of $50,000 than to create to 50 salaries of a million dollars becasue the 1000 people will spend all of their salaries (minus taxes) on basic goods and consumables. The whole $50,000,000 goes back into the economy and circulates at least five times. The 50 guys will spend about 20% of their salaries (and pay less taxes than the 1000 in the aggregate)on basic goods and consumables (high level though they may be) and try to bank or invest the other 80%.
In a nutshell an economy without a good strong mode at the median of the income curve of salaries simply collapses because it has no center to consume the things the top is trying to sell and the bottom can not afford. See 1929.

As for the pay and package of benifits of the John Spruce Society, as soon as there is any income, I plan to absconder to Mexico with it and my neighbor lady.

Pax ya'll.