I am so sick of all of the arguments against raising the minimum wage. None of them makes any sense. In fact, most of them are just complete crap, beginning with the notion that almost no one makes the minimum wage anyway. This is from testimony by some paid hack at the Heritage Foundation last year:
Relatively few Americans do so. In 2011 and 2012, 3.7 million Americans reported earning $7.25 or less per hour—just 2.9 percent of all workers in the United States. Those who do work in minimum-wage jobs fall into two distinct categories: young workers, usually in school, and older workers who have left school. Most minimum-wage earners fall into the first category; just over half are between the ages of 16 and 24. The rest are 25 or older.
I’m using this passage because it is just so much crap, and because it’s been repeated so many times over the last several years, some people actually believe parts of it, and that’s sad. I know what you’re thinking; it’s the Heritage Foundation — what else should we expect? Well, how about actual facts that are relevant to the issue?
For example, the issue isn’t just about people who make exactly the minimum wage. to make it about that trivializes the issue, which is of course the point of this right wing “think tank” anyway. It’s obfuscation, pure and simple.
In 1968, the minimum wage was increased to $1.60 an hour. In 2013 dollars, that would be the equivalent of $10.69 per hour. In other words, the $10.10 minimum wage that has been proposed would actually still be slightly below the minimum wage of 45 years ago. So, there’s that. Contrary to all the charts and graphs and sleight-of-hand that Heritage used in their testimony, the numbers are actually quite a bit higher than they claim. If you are going to make an accurate assessment of the number of people who would be affected by a minimum wage increase to $10.10 per hour, you have to count everyone in the country is currently making less than that. The total number of jobs paying less than $10 per hour is just over 18 million, which I’m sure you would agree is a lot more than 3.7 million. If you raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, which would put our minimum wage on a par with a large portion of Europe and Australia, you’d find that nearly 27 million people would be getting raises. Again, I’m no mathematician, but that seems to be a lot more than 3.7 million people.
And yet, that’s still not the issue. The real issue is fairness.
People are being paid as little as possible by huge corporations that are raking in huge bucks, while the people who put them in the position they find themselves in are forced to scrape by, or even to collect welfare. In a great number of cases, we the taxpayers are subsidizing companies who choose to pay their people a crappy wage that is well below their actual value in the market. Face it, Republicans; Walmart wouldn’t make a dime without their cashiers and sales clerks. McDonald’s would make zero dollars if they didn’t have the people on the front lines making their food and interacting positively with their customers. And yet, both companies act as if the workers owe them something, which is, of course, ridiculous.
In 2012, Walmart made a net profit of $120 billion. Of that, $76 billion was paid out in “shareholder equity.” Since the Walton family owns a little more than half of Walmart stock, that means that family alone collected $38 billion in profit in one year. If they given each of their 1.2 million employees a $10,000 raise, they still could have collected little more than $30 billion. Therefore, when a company like this says they won’t pay more, it’s not because they can’t it’s because they arrogantly refused to.
Again, we’re not just talking about the number of people who make the federal minimum wage, we’re talking about people who are scraping by because the owners of businesses refuse to pay with their labor is worth. And the people making low wages aren’t the only ones who pay. The taxpayer also takes a hit. For many low-wage workers, taxes subsidize their rent, their food, their healthcare and other things, even as we give the large corporations who hire them for substandard wages huge tax breaks for doing so. In other words, those low prices you pay at crappy stores like Walmart aren’t really as low as you’ve been led to believe.
Americans talk about ourselves as if we’re the greatest country on earth, and yet we act like we’re mediocre. Australia’s minimum wage is right around $16 per hour. Walmart pays their workers an average of about $8.10 per hour here in the United States and they fight tooth and nail every attempt by employees to unionize and get paid more. Yet, workers at Walmart stores in Europe are unionized and make nearly twice as much. does that mean their workers are twice as good? They’re doing the same things workers in the United States are doing. The only difference is, they get to go home at the end of the day and know their bills will be paid.
That’s the Republicanization of the United States, my friends. Why are we acting as if we’re both poor and mediocre? Why are we acting as if any dollar taken out of a rich corporation’s pocket is somehow anathema to economic success, when reality is just the opposite? And what is it about the Republican mentality that they can ignore history and just make up bullshit out of whole cloth and pass it off as fact?
Everything they say about the minimum wage and its effects on the economy is just pure bullshit. Raising the minimum wage has never resulted in the economic downturn. Raising the minimum wage has never resulted in a huge loss of jobs. Raising the minimum wage has an enormously stimulating effect on the economy; far more stimulating than giving rich people tax breaks. The 18 million people making less than $10 an hour right now will all get a raise when the wages increased. Approximately 3.7 million of them will be getting a raise of nearly $3 per hour. They will spend that money in our consumer-driven economy. In what alternate dimension does that sound like it would be bad for the economy? in what economic framework is giving 18 million people a significant raise in pay detrimental to the economy? No one is talking about raising the minimum wage to $20, at least all at once. In fact, no one’s talking about raising it to $10.10 per hour in one day. Most proposals have it increased over three or four years. So you can’t even make a case that it would serve as a shock to the system.
All of the arguments against the minimum wage are just plain stupid. they don’t even address the issue. There’s no excuse for people whom work full-time in any job not being able to pay for the most basic necessities of life. None. We used to be a better country than that.
Of course, that was before the Republicanization. We have to vote these people out.