COTW: Minimum Poverty

Mother Jones did a story on the striking fast food restaurant workers and included charts showing how the minimum wage in America is guaranteed to keep a person slaving in poverty while the top 1% get rich off the excess value produced by cheap labor. The official federal minimum wage is a measly $7.25/hr that has not kept up with inflation. The real value of the minimum wage has decreased 22% since 1968 when it reached a barely livable level of $9.25/hr, adjusted for inflation:

The second chart above shows that a person earning the minimum earns less in a year than the official poverty level for three people--a nuclear family with one child. Even in rural Mississippi, one of the poorest areas of America, it costs $47,000 for a family of two adults and one child to live a modest, yet secure life. Someone earning a fast-food average wage of $8.94/hr. makes only $18,595 a year. 52% of fast-food workers get public aid like food stamps for a total of $7 billion per year.

On the other end of the scale are the super-rich. It is staggering to think that only 51 Americans have a total net worth of over $1 trillion! The concentration of wealth in this country is 30 times what it was just a decade ago. Of course it is not reasonable for a restaurant worker to expect a $25/hr. wage [below], but it is equally ridiculous for the top 1% of wealthy Americans to expect a 271% increase in their incomes. If the Current Occupant really wants to improve the economy and not just give a free ride to plundering plutocrats while making patronizing speeches, he could do it by raising the minimum wage. The University of Chicago, hardly a bastion of Marxist thought, did a study of 23 years of household spending data and found a $1 raise in the minimum wage produced $2800 in new consumer spending.

Don't let the broadcasted corporatist happy-talk about lower unemployment figures fool you, either. The more realistic measure of unemployment includes those who have given up looking for work or are otherwise "marginally attached to the labor force" This official U-6 measure of unemployment for November is 13.2% which is historically very high. And if you count the long-term discouraged workers defined out of existence by the Clinton administration in 1994, the unemployment rate is actually a whopping Depression-level 23%! Tell that to the next unctuous, corporate flack who thinks he knows you.