The minimum wage is not a living wage as a recent study has shown.

In 35 states and in Washington, D.C., the living wage for a single adult is greater than $15 per hour. No state has a living wage for a single adult that is less than $14 an hour. Nationally, the living wage for a single adult is closer to $16.87 an hour. For working families with children, though, the cost to make ends meet is even higher.

I find it rather laughable that many people think we cannot afford a living wage. Well, in effect, we are paying a living wage by having to supplement the incomes of minimum wage workers. Or perhaps a better way to state it is that we the taxpayers are supplementing the profits of many low wage corporations who refuse to pay a living wage and refuse to provide full time hours and benefits to their employees. With many middle income jobs having been shipped overseas due to our disastrous trade policies, people are increasingly being forced into low wage jobs with no career ladders available for them to rise.

What has happened here in the United States is criminal and our government policies encourage the impoverishment of the people.

Great diary. Thank you for raising this issue.

thanks for the great OT, shah.

Are there any members here that belong to the DailyKos facebook group? I don't do facebook. Now would be an excellent time to post a comment advertising caucus99percent there, with the intent of possibly pulling in some disgruntled DK users. Advertise c99p as an "easy to use blogging platform".

Now would be a great time to copy/paste a link to c99p at the bottom of the comments at DK also. Something like "Visit us at caucus99percent.com--An easy to use traditional blogging platform". Blitz the place with comments and I'll bet we will get lots of new members.

1979--I worked in a shoe factory, minimum wage was 3.10, but we made piece rate, I averaged between 5-7 dollars an hour depending on what job I was doing, because on second shift I got bounced around, and soon learned how to make rate on half a dozen different machines. We also got a 7% bonus for clocking in and out on time all week. Can you imagine that kind of folding money in the hands of a 17 year old? It didn't last. Thanks President Reagan, you dick.

the greatly diminished 'buying power' of today's minimum wage, compared to the late 1960's.

I'm going to attempt to address Reid's and Pelosi's attempt to end the "Cadillac Tax." It's a bit late, since almost six years from its enactment, it has already served the purpose of slashing group health plan benefits.

Guess what? That will not be undone.

This is simply another example of doing the bidding of 'big business.'

More on this later.

Have a great day, Everyone!

Mollie

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The "Grand Bargain" isn't dead--it's being implemented incrementally through piecemeal legislation. Please read "The Moment Of Truth."

"The standard of living of the average American has to decline. I don't think you can escape that."--Paul Volcker, The New York Times, October 18, 1979, Page 1.

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart." --Helen Keller

link

Total shareholder payouts in 2014 were more than $1.2 trillion, but money moving from investors to businesses in the form of IPOs and venture capital is less than $200 billion.

That's J.W. Mason, an economics professor at City University of New York's John Jay College, writing in a recent report from the Roosevelt Institute titled "Understanding Short-Termism." Mason also shows that overall capital investment has been growing more slowly than in any other post-World War II recovery :

Instead of being invested, Mason figures, much of the cash being handed to investors is going into increased consumption by the wealthy. "Stock ownership is significantly concentrated," he reports, "with just 4 percent of households owning a majority of all shares." Meanwhile, recent research from Barry Z. Cynamon of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Steven M. Fazzari of Washington University in St. Louis, shows that households in the top 5 percent of the income distribution went from spending just over 80 percent of their incomes in 1989 to 88 percent in 2012 (for the rest of households, the consumption-to-income ratio actually declined slightly during those years). Obviously, that consumption spending still flows into the economy, but it is likely to go to less productive use than if it were being directed into investment.

On the corporate side, one explanation for what's going on could be that perverse incentives are leading chief executive officers to give money back to shareholders even when they stand a good chance of earning high returns by investing it internally. There have been many examples over the decades of corporations that turned out to be good at more than one thing, after all. Still, those returns on internal investment are likely to be years off, while activist investors are clamoring for buybacks. Even more important, those buybacks can boost CEO pay right now. In a companion report to Mason's, the Roosevelt Institute recommends buyback limits and CEO pay reforms as a way to counteract this.

makes it so tangibly understandable. My first job as a waitress in Germany I barely remember, just that I got upset, because people stole the bread sticks, which were available in a little container on each table, and they didn't tell me that I had to pay for those, if they got stolen by the customers.

My first minimum wage job in the US was as a "runner" in a hospital to dispense and deliver the medication from the hospital pharmacy to the patients' rooms. I was mocked over that job by an African immigrant young girl, who herself had absolutely nothing, but could legally live with us. It was not clear to her that white people also work odd jobs and are not always rich or privileged.

You can't live on your own on a minimum wage job. I learned it watching my son struggling with it. It's easy to destroy people's lives. Enough said.