I have chosen for this segment, one article entitled “Why Obama’s minimum wage proposal will hurt working poor” authored by Peter Morici. The article appeared in TheStreet.com, an Internet blog created by James Cramer a well known stock investments counsellor with a tv program. The article was also picked up by Fox News on February 03, 2014.
The title of the article certainly catches your attention, I thought wow, how could a substantial wage increase hurt the poor, or those receiving the increase. Well it might hurt my feet as I rush to go to the store to spend this “windfall.”
The minimum wage effective since July 24, 2009 now stands at $ 7.25 an hour. However, workers employed by federal contractors received a raise of $ 10.10 an hour promised in pending legislation, and going into effect for those workers, thanks to an Executive Order signed by the President this past week.
The author states, “Obama doesn’t tell voters the minimum wage is often paid to teenagers bagging groceries and college students on work-study jobs…” this seems to be the chant which the conservative right sings at interviews in the press. Fox News, as is commonly known, is an arch conservative news site and so is the financial blog TheStreet.com , a site for financial investors.
However, Robert Reich professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, senior fellow at the Blum Center for developing economies and former Secretary of Labor during the Clinton Administration, in an interview with National Public Radi (NPR) , stated that the Economic Policy Institute did a study in the Summer of 2012 “showing that nearly 90 percent of the recipients of a minimum wage increase are at least 20 years old, more than half work full time, more than a quarter are parents.”
But Mr. Morici goes further, saying that “…liberal papers are fond of trotting out single mothers…who recount they cannot afford to eat because they are earning so little at places like McDonalds…yet correspondents never get around to asking how they use their food stamps or about support received from their children’s father.” This really stuns me. Food stamps supplement will reach about $ 9.00 dollars a day according to the latest Farm Bill passed by Congress. How much food can you buy with $ 9.00? I do not think Professor Morici or James Cramer (a millionaire),nor the personnel, anchors, editors or executives at Fox News know the answer to that one. They probably know that they can buy a coffee at Starbucks for about $ 6.00 and they would have a couple of dollars to splurge on something else. Speaking of the Farm Bill just passed last week by Congress, food stamps were cut significantly, but Farm subsidies to those millionaire farm owners who do not farm the land remained in the bill. We are talking of hundred of thousands and several million dollars for not producing anything, and incidentally quite a few of those millionaires receiving the subsidies were Republican members of Congress who oppose raising the minimun wage. The contention that “adults earning the lowest wages have sources of income not enjoyed in Truman’s days—an earned income tax credit, food stamps and Medicaid,” does not bring up the issue that we are talking about, minimum wage for work done, for what the employers pay their workers. This is not about other federal benefits. If Morici is thinking that earned income credit, food stamps and Medicaid should be considered part of the wages received by the workers, then he must admit that federal aid in the form of income tax credit, food stamps and Medicaid is a governmental subsidy to the employers who do not pay a living wage to its employees. It is a shame that persons working full time, 40 hours week, cannot live on that salary.
It seems that to economist Morici and most Republicans the issue is about not giving the president a political victory rather than economic and moral justice. The article’s author says that McDonalds “is already challenged by an inability to raise prices because working class Americans can’t afford to pay another dollar for lunch.” Again, that could well be true, but it would be because employers are not paying a living wage to its employees! According to Professor Reich however, Walmart and McDonalds could pay its employees $ 15.00 dollars an hour without losing employees or raising prices.
Whether you believe Professor Morici or Professor Reich, still it stands to reason that any person working 40 hours a week should have wages sufficient to cover food and shelter. Most Americans think so by an overwhelming majority. In January Quinnipiac University conducted a poll about raising the minimum wage, 93 percent of Democrats approved, 52 percent Republicans approved and 69 percent of Independents also approved.
The Reverend Martin Luther King said in a 1968 sermon shortly before his assassination, “If a man doesn’t have a job or income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility of the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.”
