Images of the “Progressives”: Living Wage

Man this one just bugs me!

I think everybody who hasn’t come from a wealthy family, and many of those people too, have worked for minimum wage. You do this because you have no skills and no experience. You work those jobs for months or years to gain those assets and then you get a BETTER job.

I know some adults who work unskilled jobs, they live packed into shitty apartments eating garbage food and indeed squeak by. Hopefully they’ll use their experience and skills to better themselves, but honestly that’s their choice.

Still the “Progressives” want to extend this to families with mortgages or quality rentals. Sorry, if you want a house and kids you can’t make this money working at KFC or McDonalds. If you are in this situation you have made some VERY poor life choices and deserve a life of poverty.

People need to be driven to increase their skills and experience to get better paying jobs, be that professional jobs, skilled trades, or simply working for tips at a restaurant that supports your lifestyle.

Further even if you increase minimum wage to whatever dream you want, people will still want to live above their means. I know a person who’s parents are both doctors, but because they’ve chosen to live in Manhattan they raised their family of five in a two bedroom apartment. That’s smart living, but what’s to keep those people to have the unnatural expectation that they can live in Manhattan on two doctors salaries in a four-bedroom townhouse?

What’s to keep a minimum wage worker from thinking the same? Doesn’t matter if minimum wage is $7.50, or $25 per hour, people always have the capacity to spend more than they make. Just look at the Hollywood celebrities who are in financial trouble!

Sorry, its culture that fixes this, not “Progressive” meddling and Daddy .Gov intervention that will fix this.

As a local Author and Talk Show Host often says: “I learned a lot from working as a dishwasher. The biggest thing is I didn’t want to live my life as a dish washer.”

So was a younger me who worked minimum wage as a landscaper, a deck hand on a tour boat, and even as a research intern. Hell the last two jobs lead me to make MORE than minimum. What’s up with these mythical people who are trying to support a family flipping burgers?

If you’re well into adulthood and you can only be trusted to work the pictogram covered cash register at the local grease pit, you’ve done some seriously stupid things in your life, and there is NO government handout that will fix you.

It will make it worse tho…

This entry was posted in Freedom, Politics. Bookmark the permalink.

9 Responses to Images of the “Progressives”: Living Wage

  1. McThag says:

    Increasing minimum wage doesn’t fix a damn thing.

    It’s called inflation, more money chasing the same limited goods. Should be staggeringly steep inflation too, if they get their way.

    Then the poor unskilled drone will be right back where they are today. Or worse since the cost curve runs differently. Initially raising the wage makes the employee more expensive, and that means their cost versus automating their job changes. If it’s cheaper to install a robotic system to flip burgers than pay employees; guess what’s going to happen?

    There’s even a place where it already happened in entry-level service industry America. Remember when there was a choice between “full-service” and “self-serve” at the gas station?

    • Archer says:

      It amazes me that fully-grown adults (for a given definition of the phrase) don’t understand this.

      I understood this as a teenager, and voted against my state increasing the minimum wage – even when I made minimum wage!

      Everyone suffers when minimum wage goes up, but – with the exception of those who lose their jobs entirely – the people who suffer most will be the ones earning just above minimum, who suddenly find themselves at minimum again.

      • AZRon says:

        See, that’s the thing.

        Many times I have voted for things that cost me money because I felt it was best for the Republic.

        Apparently we grow ’em like that n’more.

        We, we, we has been relaced with Me, me,me.

        Self-reliance has been replaced with whiny dependance on others (forced) generosity.

  2. divemedic says:

    “Living wage” is a deception. They define the term to mean whatever it is that they want it to mean. The poorest in this country have more than the middle class does in other countries.
    — 43% of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage and a porch or patio.
    — 80% of poor households have air conditioning.
    — The poorest American has more living space than the average middle class individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities throughout Europe.
    — 72% of poor households own a car; 31% own two or more cars.
    — 97% of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
    — 78% have a VCR or DVD player
    — 62% have cable or satellite TV reception.
    — 89% own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.
    — a third of poor households have both cellular and landline telephones.

    Poor American children actually consume more meat than do higher-income children and have average protein intakes 100 percent above recommended levels. Most poor children today are, in fact, supernourished and grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.

    The poor of this country have nothing to complain about. America is the only nation in the world where the poorest ten percent of its citizens hear about an upcoming government handout on cable television through their big screen TV, call their friends on their cell phones, and then they drive to the government office to complain that they are poor and are not getting enough assistance.

  3. Thirdpower says:

    Last time the upped the min wage in IL, the next thing that happened was the temp workers in the company I worked for lost 2 days of paid holiday and the price of milk went up.

    I did not get a compensatory raise so the value of my skilled labor was decreased. I then did the equivalent less work because of it.

  4. Bob S. says:

    I hate the false “binary solution” questions — this is definitely a case where we have a few more options than “either – or”.

    What Maher and his ilk are basically saying is they — not the country, not the individuals — have came up with the idea of how much each and every person’s work is worth. And they will keep pushing until each and every person makes that amount, at least.

    Of course, you’ll carefully note the lack of press coverage about Maher donating his salary which is in excess of that ‘living wage’ to others.

    • Weerd Beard says:

      Great comment. Your last point of course really gels with a human observation I’ve always noted.

      NOBODY votes for Socialism thinking they will be WORSE off in the system. Maher wants OTHERS to pay more workers wage…OR more welfare payments. He’ll make sure his taxes withholdings are maximized so that he won’t have to worry about it.

  5. Archer says:

    Purely anecdotal, but I’ve found among folks I’ve met that most people’s “first” jobs are minimum wage (or possibly SLIGHTLY above minimum wage) work.

    I’ve also found that this generally holds true whether they work a part-time job in high school at age 16, or get their first job after college at age 23.

    “Entry-level” means exactly that: it’s where you enter the work-force. It makes no difference where you are in your life when you do it. Especially in this job market, you have to be ridiculously overqualified to “start” anywhere above entry-level.

    I’m going to encourage my kids to have a part-time job while in high school (as long as it doesn’t interfere with academics). I feel it’s an advantage to have good work references established when they’re young – well before applying for any “real” jobs – plus they can save some money for college and not have to take so much in loans, if any.

  6. Joe in PNG says:

    Another trope that inevitably gets brought up in this discussion is that of the Eeeee-vil CEO who steals money from the poor oppressed worker to fill his money bin. (sigh) And somehow raising the minimum wage is going to punish this specter, this boogieman in the mind of the person raising this point?

    But if you try to bring up the fact that most people don’t work for large companies, that raising the minimum wage hurts the small, independant guys, these idiots get a slack look and start talking about mythical CEO’s.

Leave a Reply to Bob S. Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *