Minwage3 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
If Marco Rubio is the best hope that the Republicans have to regain the confidence of a majority of voters, we will have a Democratic congress in 2014. He is a pure Tea Party advocate of laissez-faire government, and the American people have spoken on that subject. Calling it trickle down economics or the free market doesn't change the diversion from the precepts of civil community in a nation into something civil in itself. Rubio stands for social Darwinism, but even on that score, he doesn't understand, nor does the Tea Party or the Republican conservative complex (Rcc), that even natural economic selection is now impossible because the economic deck is immutably stacked unless government intervenes. Money is in the hands of a very few, and money is power in a capitalist society, which isn't a bad thing if constraints impose the burden to use wealth wisely, justly and magnanimously, but we don't have that here, do we. The proof is in the opposition to a minimum wage of just $9 per hour: barely enough to allow the individual who receives it to earn income in excess of the poverty level. Yet, corporate executives are receiving compensation at obscene levels never seen before...Jamie Dimon, for example, being paid $23 million per year as his firm, J.P. Morgan, presides over the derivatives market and indulges in misfeasance that costs shareholders billions of dollars. And the corporate misfeasance, or even malfeasance, that is rampant in American finance is institutionalized in things like the derivatives market, which is nothing but high stakes poker for people who have too much money. It led to this depression we are still digging out of, yet those in power do nothing about it. All of that is the pudding in which the proof that our society is structurally unfair is baked. Yet those few who possess so much and have so much power would conspire to prevent the working poor from ever having decent lives on the pretext that if they just work hard...presumably harder than they are working to clean bathrooms, sweep floors and flip burgers already...they too can be rich.
But foregoing diatribe and social commentary, the minimum wage issue demonstrates the failure of the Republican Party to adopt a body of economic policy that serves our society at large so as to make themselves a viable political party in America. The rationale behind their opposition to an increased minimum wage...even minimal increase in the minimum wage...is counterintuitive, and in the case of issues like this one, intuition is all there is. The purported empiricism of agents of the political parties like the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation is nothing but a myth regardless of whose side they or you are on. But simple arithmetic tells the tale. If capitalism is based on incentive, the minimum wage isn't one if you can't live above the poverty line when you earn it. And if that is the case, no employer who pays the minimum wage can expect loyalty, or even diligence for that matter. Then there's the other side of the equation. While sub-poverty wages do get spent in their entirety on survival, they provide less economic stimulus than wages that allow a higher standard of living until the wages in question reach a level that allows savings. And while I can't speak for you, it is only since both of my children finished college and one of them moved out that saving was possible, so wages well into the mid five figures stimulate the economy dollar earned for dollar of gross domestic product. Thus, more wages means more jobs, more consumption, more profit and thus more need for inventory that can be satisfied by reinvestment. Fifty two thousand dollars per year is a thousand dollars a week, and that translates to $25 per hour for a forty hour week. Until we get to at least that level, dollars earned are being spent, and thus recycled, creating wealth for all, including the workers whose lives take on the character of being worth living. Therefore, until we are talking about a $25 per hour minimum wage, we aren't asking too much, in my opinion. The Rcc mantra on the subject is that an increase in the minimum wage will reduce profit and lead to less hiring. But the question is, are jobs at the current minimum wage worth creating, and more importantly, are they worth having. If you can't survive on that kind of wages, why work for them.
But there is a moral side to all this as well, and it is essentially the values equation that the American people are resolving at this point in our history. Are we a society of three hundred million individuals, or are we a society of three hundred million Americans, joined at the conscience by a higher calling than making money unfettered. Are we a community in which the community, while it may not come first, has real and meaningful significance in all of our lives. Can we survive claiming that we are the exceptional nation on earth when we tolerate such inequity in our economic system that those with more than they need can determine with moral impunity that those with nothing should not have more. Does that inequity rise to the level of iniquity, and is God going to get us for it.
Your friend,
Mike
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