Polls are showing really strong support for raising the minimum wage. The most recent Quinnipiac poll showed that even a slight majority of Republicans favored raising the minimum wage, with 69 percent of respondents overall favoring it. I don’t know if there are polls asking this specific question going back over the years, but my guess is there wasn’t this much support for raising the minimum wage until very recently.
Of course, as we saw a year ago with gun control, just because a whopping majority of Americans want something doesn’t mean Washington will respond.
Paul Krugman writes that our growing income inequality is not only holding back the economy; it’s skewing government as well
This is especially clear if we try to understand why Washington, in the midst of a continuing jobs crisis, somehow became obsessed with the supposed need for cuts in Social Security and Medicare. This obsession never made economic sense: In a depressed economy with record low interest rates, the government should be spending more, not less, and an era of mass unemployment is no time to be focusing on potential fiscal problems decades in the future. Nor did the attack on these programs reflect public demands.
Surveys of the very wealthy have, however, shown that they — unlike the general public — consider budget deficits a crucial issue and favor big cuts in safety-net programs. And sure enough, those elite priorities took over our policy discourse.
See also Bill Moyers, The Great American Class War: Plutocracy Versus Democracy.
I don’t know if most Americans realize that food stamps and other forms of public assistance from taxpayers actually benefit corporations. Joan Walsh writes it’ s not just Wal-Mart and McDonald’s —
One in three bank tellers receives public assistance, the Committee for Better Banks revealed last week, at a cost of almost a billion dollars annually in federal, state and local assistance. That’s right: One of the nation’s most profitable, privileged and high-prestige industries, banking, pays a sector of its workers shockingly low wages and relies on taxpayers to lift them out of poverty. In New York alone, 40 percent of bank tellers and their family members receive public assistance, costing $112 million in state and federal benefits.
Bank CEOs get multi-million dollar bonuses as profits soar, while millions of tellers are so poor they get welfare. Something’s wrong with that.
Revulsion at subsidizing profitable corporations that pay poverty-level wages is helping fuel a wave of long-overdue organizing and protest on behalf of low-wage workers, from the fast-food strikes that have swept the country to Wal-Mart protests this holiday season. Taxpayers recoil at the notion, but so do many workers themselves. “I thought I could make it on my own. That didn’t happen,†Wal-Mart worker Aubretia Edick, who makes $11.70 an hour and still gets public assistance, told the Huffington Post. That’s why she joined a one-day strike. “Wal-Mart doesn’t pay my salary,†she said. “You pay my salary.â€
The U.S. now has the highest proportion of low-wage workers in the developed world, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
My sense of things is that at least some people are waking up to this. But are enough people going to wake up soon enough?
“My sense of things is that at least some people are waking up to this. But are enough people going to wake up soon enough?”
MSM:
Look! Over there – a missing young white chick!
Conservatives:
Sure, some of you good Christian working white people get minimum wage and Welfare.
But the “Blah’s,” browns, yellows, reds, EEEEBIL MOOOZLIMZ, single women, and gays, get more! They get a Super-secret minimum wage, and Super-ObamaWelfare, just for them! AND, Obamaphones!!! DON’T LET THEM TELL YOU OTHERWISE!!!
The solution is to cut taxes on our blessed “Job Creators” – from whom all that’s worth living for, comes from.
Wait, what’s that? Ooooh! We can feel the ‘trickle-down” starting!
Just give it a few more decades, and it’ll be a flood!
Really!
BWAH-HA-HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!
“Soon enough” would have been awhile ago. Instead the question is “when” and what happens then. It will happen though.
I strongly recomend reading “Twilight of the Elites” which covers a lot of ground on our elite dysfunction, but also helps you understand how seriously out of it, cocooned, and limited the elites are.
“I don’t know if most Americans realize that food stamps and other forms of public assistance from taxpayers actually benefit corporations.”
Redistribution from the public to private!No, they don’t.Sorry, Monty, but they do, in two ways. First, the taxes we pay in food stamps are subsidizing corporations that underpay their workers. For example, Walmart workers can survive on their meager salaries because they are poor enough to get public assistance, and this allows the Walmart family to pay themselves more money in profits. From the Joan Walsh article:
Now, consider if Walmart and similar businesses were required to pay their workers enough money that they could buy their own groceries and not need taxpayers assistance. Would you argue against that? Why?
The other way corporations profit is more direct. In some states the administration of food stamp program has been privatized, so that corporations can take a cut of the welfare money before it gets to poor people. JP Morgan, Xerox, and eFunds Corp are making considerable profits on food stamps. According to a JP Morgan spokesman, the food stamp program “is a very important business to JP Morgan. It’s an important business in terms of its size and scale…The good news from JP Morgan’s perspective is the infrastructure that we built has been able to cope with that increase in volume..”
See “Profits from Poverty: How Food Stamps Benefit Corporations”
Trust me, whenever you hear some politicians promoting privatizing anything, whether Medicare, public schools, or support services for the military, what’s behind that is a scheme for private industry to get its hands on taxpayer dollars. There’s plenty of real-world experience showing us that privatization ends up costing taxpayers more, not less.
Money is speech in today’s America. So people against raising the minimum wage are trying to keep the rest of us quiet.
Oh yes they do, Monty. Right wing media outlets promote a divide and conquer strategy, much like the colonial powers of the past. It’s the same game, different century.
In 1802, Jefferson wrote in a lettter to the Danbury Baptists,
“”make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” (Stay with me, I’m not OT here.) At that time, to any objective student of current events in Euorope, or the recent history (1700-1800) which included for Jefferson the end of the Spanish Inquisition, the partnership between religion and government was parasitic and oppressive without exception. Religion is not by itself oppressive, not is government (I wish republicans got this, but I digress.)
Understand the mechanism at work – the State Religion endorsed and legitimized the king, and in turn the king gave his loyalty, and that of the state and citizens, to the State Religion. There is enormous symbiotic power int hat partnership – and it’s the same partnership that empowers the plutocracy we are in.
When the RX industry wanted to expand business with the US government and charge the US government the highest price, the got the monopoly they wanted with Medicare Part B. Huge sums of money crossed hands between the RX industry and lobbyists. K Street is the largest employer of retired Congress people, paying them millions in annual salaries after they retire as a delayed reward for their fealty to the lobbyist ‘religion’ they joined while in office.
Look at Obamacare. That was a deal which gave the insurance industry a monopoly. There was never a public option seriously under consideration, because the lobbyist sects who command the loyalty of Congress prohibited it. The parts of the Farm Bill which both parties endorse are a huge gift to agribusiness, who showers lobbyists with money. Look at special tax exemptions which grant connected, profitable corporations tax exemptions, and you find the same connection. The list goes on – Hedge Fund managers and their special tax rates, subsidies to oil companies.. who have I left out?
Business, like religion can be a good servant of the people, serving the needs of the people and earning a just return. Megacorporations make lousy masters and stupid parasites. Their greed exceeds their wisdom – they will kill off the host with their bloodsucking. The solution for the problem is just the same as Jeffferson saw the solution for prohibiting that evil partnership. Build a Wall of Separation between government and the corrosive effect of the large sums of money they can invest in schemes to control government. I think this means a Constitutional Amendment and supporting legislation that blocks all illegitimate money flowing between business and members of Congress, while candidates, members and after retirement. There are credible groups pursuing this now – and they are not part of the discussion.
Why?
“Polls are showing really strong support for raising the minimum wage”
Yes normally this would lead to action. I really agree with Joan Walsh’s points, if the public at large really saw that these low wages are costing the treasury and adding to the deficit it would be raised tomorrow. The problem our media is so corrupt they won’t report these things, why Wal-Mart or Yum brands or McDeatholds may start pulling some ads. Joan should understand this, she works for one of the worst abusers. MSNBC will never report on the dangers of fracking or the abuses in the pharmaceutical industry have you seen the ads?
“No, they don’t”
Hey Monty that’s quite an argument!!!!!