Night Strike wrote:
It's not best for the nation to keep raising the minimum wage. Keiths provided a great example of why this is not so. Most adults don't work for minimum wage, and if they do, it's THEIR responsibility to improve themselves to get a higher paying job. And raising the minimum wage inherently hurts the people who were already getting paid above the old minimum wage.
I realize this is a traditional line of economic thought. I also realize it is now being roundly decried as just plain wrong.
Night Strike wrote:I stopped getting raises at work because the rise in minimum wage eclipsed what I was getting paid, so although I had done exceptional work for nearly 2 years, I was forced to get paid the same amount as a starting employee. It's a continuous circle that the public use to harm the economy: people raise minimum wage, prices have to go up to pay those wages, people claim wages have to go up more to pay for those prices. It's a stupid cycle that kills our economy.
Your employer taking advantage of you and your willingness to keep working there and not go out and as YOU said, improve yourself to get a higher wage, is not to be blamed on a rise in the minimum wage. Too many employers think that workers are superfolous. Too many employers fail to understand that a
poor manager is the number one factor in poor performance and productivity, not "lazy workers". Lazy workers absolutely exist, but a good manager can motivate the overwhelming majority. A poor manager can only criticize everyone around and sees no problem in cutting wages. Sure, they may send out nice notices geared to get a their employees to go out and vote in ways that will benefit the employer, not themselves.
It is classic manipulation. Turn employees focus on the "other", and not toward the REAL causes.. namely folks at the top who take profit without reinvesting, managers who are incompetent (poor people managers, at any rate), etc.
The REAL truth is that most people in this country really ARE hard-working, really ARE honest. But, I don't care who you are. It takes a lot out of a person to know that they have to work over 40 hours a week to find that they STILL cannot pay basic bills, but the managers have no problem taking vacations to Bermuda, sending THEIR kids to private schools and colleges and taking 2 hour lunch breaks. This is not about a bit more education. It is certainly not about people who are lazy. Its about going from a society where work really mattered, where a person producing something .. be it a product OR a service.. meant something.
Today, all that matters is stock portfolios. A manager can be an absolute jerk, can make the company profitable SOLELY by cutting corners, forcing people to work 2-3 jobs at once, etc.. he gets a nice bonus and the workers are lucky if they aren't laid off. He gets away with it because so many jobs are moving overseas, moved by other people who could care less about workers or real production, they again just want high stock prices.
THAT is the real cycle AND, you see the result all around us. We have an economy built upon the utterly false idea of unlimited growth. Growth works for a while. It is wonderful while it does, but for the LONG term you have to look at sustainability. There is nothing at all about our economy that is sustainable, not even agriculture. And the sad part is too many people like you would rather read esoteric economics texts that have little bearing on real life, often don't even realize how limited they are, instead of looking around and just plain seeing what is in front of you.
What is around us is agricultural land that is beind destroyed in various ways, timber that is being harvested in completely unsustainable ways, companies that are built on the idea of "planned obscelescence" to make a profit, and an unemployment rate that, bad as it is, masks many, many, many people such as myself who are either underemployed or who have just left the job market entirely. What we have is a house of cards that is falling.
It has almost nothing to do with "entitlements" and the other garbage the right wing throws out. Those are merely symptoms of the REAL problem. The real problem is that our nation has revelled in a boom and bust economy, revelled in the boom and forgotten that a "bust" pretty much always follows. The real problem is that our nation has turned it back on, in many ways never bothered to embrace, sustainability, becuase we were founded on massive growth and exploitation of resources, both our own and those of other, third world countries.
Know what? Many of those now third world countries were themselves once mighty and great nations. Then too many people at the top got greedy and they fell. We ignore that to our perile.
