"When I flew to Seattle last week, airport security gave me trouble over the four-pound ham I was carrying. Several TSA officials gathered to consider the question of whether ham is a 'gel,' to which I retorted: If ham is a gel, so am I. I suggested that they biopsy it for hidden box-cutters. I offered to divide it into 21 three-ounce chunks, each appropriately stowed in a Ziploc baggie. But no deal.
So I broke down and told them I was flying into what I had been
warned would be a food-free zone: Washington, with the highest minimum wage in the country ($7.63 an hour), could hardly be expected to have affordable restaurants or a functioning economy of any kind. Notable conservative economists have almost unanimously predicted that an increased minimum wage would result in wild price increases and mass unemployment, and I had a suitcase full of clippings to prove it."
Right....read on for a great article that makes the case FOR raising the national minimum wage. The author,Barbara Ehrenreich, has written a wonderful book on living in poverty, Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America, where she takes several minimum wage jobs across the country and tries to live on that wage...and that is just herself, no kids, no spouse. It's a life that unfortunately many people live, and a life that all too often does not allow one to "pull themselves up by the bootstraps." After an eight or more hour shift, a two hour bus ride, tending to children's needs, there often is not just enough hours in the day to do those things necessary (like go to school, look for a better job, etc.) that lead to paths out of poverty. When we are heading towards spending a 3/4 of a Trillion Dollars on an unjust war, but we can't afford --I take that back, we can afford to, but don't -- to help people find a way out of poverty, something is wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment