In an effort to end the week on a high note, here’s another good thing to follow the Couple of Good Things I posted about yesterday. By the way, I was accused by a few commenters of being kinda Pollyanna-ish in that post, making too much of a big deal about small advances. One commenter said, “Let’s not step over a dollar bill to pick up a nickel,” a phrase I’d never heard before but which I will repeat ten times today so it becomes a permanent part of my vocabulary (I should mention, however, a google search indicated that the phrase usually talks about dimes, not nickels. Inflation, dontcha know). But sometimes, I just gotta take good news where I can find it.
Today’s good thing is our ex-Gov. Janet Napolitano, now President of the University of California, announcing that she’s raising wages of some workers in the U.C. system to $15 an hour.
Napolitano announced the move a day after Los Angeles County — the nation’s largest government agency — agreed to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour in all unincorporated communities by 2020. Los Angeles enacted a similar plan earlier this year, becoming the largest city in the nation to do so.
Let me mention the limits of Napolitano’s move before commenters do. It will only affect about 3,200 U.C. employees, not everyone currently making less than $15 per hour. Still, it’s a small step forward in the struggle against income inequality. I honestly didn’t expect the movement to raise the minimum wage to gather this much momentum this quickly, but I’m happy that it has.
This article appears in Jul 23-29, 2015.
If it’s a good thing, why is it only $15/hour? Shouldn’t it be at least $100/hr? Or is Queen Nappy saying those folks can only have so much of a good thing? Got to keep those serfs in line you know.
Did anyone ask the taxpayer? Oops, I forgot, to the social communists, the ‘progressives’ like the author don’t believe it’s the taxpayer’s money, it’s his to give away and there is as much to give as there is to take.
Pigs at the trough.
No trough, just pigs with no initiative. Learn how to advance yourselves like the rest of us. It’s not impossible. But it takes effort.
You are the same slave at $15 per hour than you were at 7.35. But you got extra money for a pack of smokes. Set some goals, work hard at them and teach them to others. Stop this lazy whining.
They will get their way but taxes and run away inflation will erode the pay raise. Combined with no increase in productivity we will have the same slackards pissing and moaning that they need $30 an hour, but they won’t ever get it. Less damage would be done to the US economy if you would beg on the street corners like the others.,
A relevant thought from Terry Eagleton:
“It took some time for capitalism to root out modes of feeling inherited from feudalism, and a tourist outside Buckingham Palace might well consider that some vital areas were carelessly overlooked. It would not, one hopes, take quite so long to produce a social order in which schoolchildren studying history would greet with utter incredulity the fact that once upon a time millions of people went hungry while a handful of others fed caviar to their poodles. It would seem as alien and repellent to them as the thought of disembowelling a man for heresy now seems to us.”
Some people still have hope that we will eventually overcome our primitive, atavistic (and shameful) impulse to vilify the poor and blame those the system exploits for their vulnerability to exploitation.
Full time work deserves to earn a living wage, and in this wealthy country we can well afford to have public policy that ensures this. Arguments that deny that this is possible or threaten apocalyptic consequences if we pay workers a just wage are scams and those who advance them have been duped. Their overlords hear the way their minions among the 99% advance arguments against their own economic best interests and laugh all the way to the bank.
JWAP…did you come here from Greece? Your theory sounds eerily familiar. Take from the producers? It sounds like reverse slavery. Has your government already capped freebies?
Income equality is so much BS. You are paid according to your contribution to your employer or society. No one deserves more than they give in return.
All of us start life with a level of intelligence and develop a set of skills as we grow. Most at the bottom are the victims of their own bad choices or they were too lazy to work 15 -18 hours a day and attend school (I did for years to get a degree; washing cars in Phoenix for 25 cents an hour in the mid 1950s, among many other things).
Natural selection will remove these types from the gene pool if our government forces a work-for -welfare system. Personal responsibility is the answer, not artificially forced high wages or forever welfare.
Big Sis ( as Rush calls her). Big sport with other people’s money.
Jared Jewelers calls her. They get no call back. You figure it out.
Figure out a Liberal. WAY past my pay scale.
Key word is raising SOME of the workers to $15 and hour. What do they do that is worth more than others?
Some screw up every third order. With others it’s every other one.
If you think everyone in this country is paid what they’re due you’re a damn fool. Hey let’s keep paying CEOs and useless celebrities ridiculous amounts while the people doing the grunt work scrape by.
Did it ever occur to any of you incredibly mean spirited folks that without workers consumption–i.e.we all need to be able to BUY things–the whole economic system caves in?production is for consumption and a handfull of people, even incredibly greedy ones,can’t consume enough to keep the system running.
Oh and “what again” what makes you think that higher wage won’t be taxed?you are not the only taxpayer around you know! We are ALL taxpayers,some of us more generous than others obviously.
I don’t see how this helps keep tuition down. I thought your concern was kids not being able to afford college and then being saddled with debt. Who is going to pay for this?
Greece has been on austerity programs for years and years. It does not work. No evidence that keeping people poor helps the economy and some evidence that raising the minimum wage benefits the economy. Support is growing in Europe to support Greece by sending basic human needs. They have struggled for so long, they need everything.
Our poor(meaning AZ) have many with 2 people in the households making minimum wage and cannot get ahead. Of course there are poorer people than they are with single people making only that and some with children. It is not reasonable to believe that someday they will be able to pull themselves up because school is not even affordable. Smart states like Tennessee have now made community college free because they no longer have enough skilled labor. Smart Tennessee. Too bad they had to get their economy in such bad shape(to not have the needed employees because they are untrained) to offer free education.
http://republic3-0.com/tennessee-promise-f…
So we need to consider raising minimum wage because there is some evidence that it is helping in certain states. The jury is still out on many states … not enough evidence it is helping. However, from what I can find there is no evidence that it is hurting the states- only projections by naysayers(Republicans).http://www.dol.gov/minwage/mythbuster.htm
And we need to making education affordable. Two very good choices which our state does not do. Again, look at Greece. For that matter, look at Arizona!!! As you know, Arizona has been under Republican leadership since the early 1980s Napolitano had a red congress), and we are massively in debt.
Hmmm……. something about many of the posts so far cannot be true because of the evidence of their thinking( no raising of minimum wage and in the past supporting the raising of the cost of education) in Arizona.
MORE OF THE GIMME GIMME crowd — LET SOMEONE ELSE PAY FOR IT. Right Safier.
Save the old “mean spirited” mantra. That stopped working after Hillary Clinton covered up the murdered Americans in Benghazi. her “vast” right wing conspiracy turned out to be her own incompetence.
David W it actually stopped working long before that. Brit Hume former anchor person ABC News said today this is just how the Clintons work. They lie, they deceive and they obfuscate. It’s worked for them for years, but Americans are tired of it.