“there are people in their 40’s who make minimum wage” Exactly. They should not have families if they cannot support them.
Former engineers even.
And it’s going to get worse. As the feds take more and more from businesses in taxes and mandates, those costs will have to be passed on to the consumers and “minimum wage” will buy less and less. And jobs will become fewer and fewer. And individual income taxes will become higher and higher. Which means that more and more people who used to earn decent wages will be working to survive on lower and lower lifestyles.
So, to all of those who voted for “change” I say, be careful what you vote for…
@bing- Maybe they had a family, then lost their job through no fault of their own. I guess they’ll have to get rid of their family now.
" there are people in their 40’s who make minimum wage. "
How many minumum wage jobs do they have ? A person with 2 jobs makes twice the minumum wage as a person who has one job.
I agree with Bing about being able to support a family.
An uncle raised 7 children. When he left his job after a day’s work, he’d stop at a bowling alley every day.
He managed the bowling alley as his second job. He elected to raise a family and he did what ever it took to get the job done. He and his wife raised 7 successful, independent adults. That reflects how I was raised, too, not by hoping for or living on entitlements. You’ve got to give it whatever it takes to get the job done !
CSA
No, “they” should not have families until they can afford them… But apparently Maslow was correct in his assessment of human nature.
It’s ridiculous to assume that so many hard working people in low paid jobs can just “earn” there way to the better wage when a simple managerial position held for a dozen years leaves little opportunity for those under for advancement. This scenereo is repeated over and over again throughout many corporations. Raising the minimum wage can raise the wage of those more experienced but still can’t advance… But, if your moral circle is too small, we can just blame poverty on the working poor for being too lazy to advance themselves and say it’s all about the free market.
Check history…before unions and govt intervention to keep wages relavent, we did the libertarian thing…it was easy back then for corporations to ride the backs of third world labor to prosperity. They must have had moral circles that extended no farther then from the home office to he nearest bank.
@rodknox
The idea of not having families until you can afford them while not supporting a women’s right to choose, sex education and birth control, leaves the religious right with but one alternative. They can organize them selves, hide behind trees and at the appropriate time, jump up an yell " cut that out ! " (Bill Cosby)
Well the hierchy of humans needs suggests that one will not move from the basic needs level to the self-actualization level until one has satisfied the lower needs. So if one were stuck at a dead end hamburger flipping job, a family would not be what would motivate them but more money and security. So calling one an associate instead of a clerk, or a shift manager instead of a fry cook, erroniously would have no motivational value. Bonus pay for perfecting cash register skills or food preparation skills might.
I’m not against a reasonable minimum wage, just the idea that it must be a living wage to support a family. With the EIC, food programs, rent programs, and a myiad of other programs to support low wage earners, I suspect that we encourage people to stay at the low wage position instead of moving up the hierchy, plus we subsidize crapola companies like Walmart who than don’t have to pay a normal wage.
When I worked in the restaurant, it was mostly high school kids with very very few adults. No one expected it to be a living wage but just to help with school and other expenses. No one expected to stay there for years.
The 40 million blacks in this country are the unintended result of capitalism at its finest. As was the slaughter of 600,000 boys in a war to settle the “difference of opinion” of the day.
@RK - ok…so 150-year-old history is where we’re looking???
@CSA " not by hoping or living on entitlements "
With all due respect, you were born and raised through the help of government entitlements. You went to tax payer supported public schools, traveled on their roads, got to live in the security of sponsored defense, nationally and locally, we’re fed food, safe for consumption made so by govt. funds entitling you to do so. Our narrow minded idea of what an entitlement is; a gift, when in reality it’s our own tax paying monies returned to us in ways WE determine to help us when we can’t help ourselves, like SS keeps so many of the elderly from homelessness through their previous tax contributions… and Medicare in insures us when NO PRIVATE insurance company wants for a price anyone but the super rich can afford. So, unless you were a member of the Mennonite or Amish, you like me and the rest of us are awash in entitlements.
Just because you refuse to accept your SS and your Medicare, doesn’t mean the rest of us did not contribute to your building a fruitful and successfully life. We helped you, you helped us…through entitlements.
Just noting that greed has been blinding the ambitious for quite some time, @texases. Nothing new in the basic situation. The greedy have and will continue to take full advantage of everyone and everything at their disposal. A good system of government should recognize and restrict the predatory efforts of the wealthy to subjugate the working class. We don’t have a very good system of government at the present time, apparently.
That’s what numerous government agencies are supposed to do. They fail, of course, but that pales in comparison to the crimes against the ‘working class’ committed by many other systems.
Well, ahem, sounds like a manifesto. lets just be truthful, its not just the wealthy making life hard on the working or underclass. Police will tell you that 90% of the crime is street or drug crime. A Wall Street banker is not about hold a gun to your head or steal your car. So guess the greed is at both ends of the scale.
No doubt, @Bing. And the greedy on both ends of the scale deserve to be prosecuted but America seems to hold the greedy thieves at the top in high regard.
@Bing
We have 5% of the worlds population, and more then half of the worlds incarcerated. More then 70% of those in prison are in there for offenses related to crimes involved in addiction. Now, if it stopped there and we kept them in that would be one thing. But, the children of those in prison are 6 times more likely to committe a felon. At this rate, the more prisons we build, the more crime we will generate over time. We are doing something wrong other then just arresting the criminals. So, unless you want to start imprisoning kids of felons before they commit crimes, we need to get more serious about EDUCATION, of not only the kids of felons, but felons themselves. What we are doing now, ain’t working.
On that subject, @dagosa, I must add that our current deification of corporate profits has resulted in privatized penal facilities that are being marketed to keep them full. All manner of perks and bonuses are being paid to law enforcement and the judiciary to keep the cells filled and the profits maxed out for Cells-R-Us.
Frome th U.S. Buereau of Justice Statistics (bjs.gov):
Rearrest within 3 years
67.5% of prisoners released in 1994 were rearrested within 3 years, an increase over the 62.5% found for those released in 1983
The rearrest rate for property offenders, drug offenders, and public-order offenders increased significantly from 1983 to 1994. During that time, the rearrest rate increased:
- from 68.1% to 73.8% for property offenders
- from 50.4% to 66.7% for drug offenders
- from 54.6% to 62.2% for public-order offenders
The rearrest rate for violent offenders remained relatively stable (59.6% in 1983 compared to 61.7% in 1994).
To the top
Reconviction within 3 years
Overall, reconviction rates did not change significantly from 1983 to 1994. Among, prisoners released in 1983, 46.8% were reconvicted within 3 years compared to 46.9% among those released in 1994. From 1983 to 1994, reconviction rates remained stable for released:
- violent offenders (41.9% and 39.9%, respectively)
- property offenders (53.0% and 53.4%)
- public-order offenders (41.5% and 42.0%)
Among drug offenders, the rate of reconviction increased significantly, going from 35.3% in 1983 to 47.0% in 1994.
To the top
Returned to prison within 3 years
The 1994 recidivism study estimated that within 3 years, 51.8% of prisoners released during the year were back in prison either because of a new crime for which they received another prison sentence, or because of a technical violation of their parole. This rate was not calculated in the 1983 study.
Want to reduce crime? Get convicted criminals off the streets.
Great Britain’s success with Australia might indicate that such an effort with repeat criminals in the US would be worthwhile, @tsm. And of course, the French effort in Guiana was a notable success.
We need to do something different but can we afford to build and support enough prisons to keep criminals permanently incarcerated? And don’t get me wrong. I don’t wish to be lenient on criminals. I would support the return to hard labor but a much better system of oversight compared to 50 years ago is needed.
@same
Getting criminals off the street is indeed the short term solution…but, the statistics also show that incarceration breeds more criminal activity. There are many other factors to long term crime prevention then just getting criminals off the street. We have been doing that at a rate unmatched by any other country in the world, with less then satisfactory results. But, simple solutions are more easily showcased then those that may actually work.
the 3 strike rule got a lot of people put in prison for a long time, and some were for minor things like possession of a small amount of pot. Yet they get thrown in the same prison as those who committed armed robbery and/or aggravated assault multiple times.
There’s also the joke that we should put the criminals into nursing homes and the elderly into prisons. This way the senior citizens would have 24/7 surveillance in case something happened to them, free medical care, plenty of opportunity to exercise, 3 hot meals a day, daily showers and a plethora of other things to make them more comfortable.
The prisoners would get lights out at 7, 2 baths a week, meals when the staff got around to it, pay their own money to have to stay there and forced to stay in their rooms most of the day