Raise the Minimum Wage

I may have already written on this, but just in case, I want to be perfectly clear about the basis of my belief.

I am sitting here this a.m. finishing my tea, having read my newspapers, and finally waking up my brain playing number teasers on-line, when a train goes by.  I live 3 blocks from the train station and love it because it takes me back to the small town I grew up in where I listened to the trains passing through town at night and dreamed of going wherever that engineer was going.

So this morning's train made me think of that engineer.  And I thought about how a society functions with people doing all kinds of jobs to make that society work.  Each of those people have a need to live by earning a livable wage.  And I thought how each of us has an obligation to society to pay enough for whatever we buy so that each person in that supply chain earns a livable wage.

No one should have to work 80 hours a week and have a barely livable income.  And if we can't pay a teenager $10.00 an hour to staff a pizza joint or man a checkout counter in a bodega or country market, then raise the prices by a penny or two or even 10 cents, and pay them $3.00 more an hour.

Some cynics might say all that would be doing is putting more drug money in their pockets, but maybe a little more income for honest work might keep urban teenagers out of gangs and reduce the student loans that college students have to take out.

My work in college paid my rent, utilities, and food with 25 hours a week.  $25*$7*4= $700 a month before taxes.  I don't think that would pay rent, utilities, and food anymore.   Inflation hurts low income people much more then it hurts higher income people.

Raise the minimum wage.