Atomictumor

So says CNN (or Fox, if thats your bag - wait, as of 2 PM they haven’t reported it yet):

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Republican-controlled Senate refused Wednesday to raise the minimum wage, rejecting an election-year proposal from Democrats for the first increase in nearly a decade.

What I don’t get, and never really got about the whole minimum wage debate, is that raising the wage only changes the scale of things, but doesn’t get anybody ahead. Now, I’m not an economic genius, and C’d my way through economics in high school thanks to my rugged good looks, but it seems to me that it works like fractions. You can bump up that bottom denominator, say go from 9/16 to 18/32, but the end result is the same, because that numerator goes up with the denominator.

Damn, that was awkward. Lets think of it with fish sticks. No, wait, thats not going to work.

OK, I have no analogy. But minimum wage, while a fine idea to keep people from getting paid like illegal immigrants (whoops, wrong issue), is a bad idea. Want the minimum wage to go up, kids? Stop working for that much. Get another job. It doesn’t take qualifications to get more than $5.15, or even the $7.25 that Ted Kennedy wanted so bad. All it takes is looking for a job.

Seriously, man, damnation, I’m really not conservative in any sense of the word, but does that seem so hard for these democrats to understand? We raise minimum wage, and all that does is devalue the dollar.

Wanna help poor people? Check this out Washington, what you need to do to fix all these people raising kids on minimum wage and whatnot is

1. Give them decent health and dental (with vision) insurance. And Tenncare (or equivalent) doesn’t cut it, there needs to be universal health insurance, or there needs to be some mad caps on how much doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies can charge. Seems one answer is easier than the other.
   Of course, to do this, we’d have to pay more taxes, and these “don’t tread on me” boneheads aren’t going to let that happen. C’est la vie.
2. Start busting out some LIVING WAGE action. We need to ensure that people are above federal poverty guidelines, and a $7.25, in Oak Ridge, isn’t going to do it.
   How do we go about doing this? I don’t know. Thats why I’m not running for office. Seems to me, again, it’d be an increase in taxes, and now we hear the “don’t pay for people to slack” crowd start in.
3. Make crap more affordable. Anybody with a reasoning brain can tell you that sales tax is a tax on the poor. Drop sales taxes anyway possible on essentials (food, gas, etc), and bump em in elsewhere. State income tax? Sure, sounds good. You can pay those taxes with the money you save on the sales tax (at least I could, once I did the math). Course, now we get the “no state taxes, honk your horn” crowd that screwed up the last attempt to fix this.

You know, now that I look at it, there seems to be a common thread in all of this. What kind of people would
a: decline an increase in taxes to help those down on the luck
b: gripe up and down about how everybody on financial assistance packages are lazy
c: rabidly oppose a state income tax that would relieve sales taxes?

You got it, misanthropes would oppose it.

Now, I’ll give a dollar to whoever can come up with that analogy I was looking for up there…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Justice, Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.