Poverty

Minimum wage is a neat idea. Everybody ought to get paid at least a certain amount of money. never mind if their skills only produce half that amount of value for the business enterprise. It's just a nice idea. So, we have had minimum wage laws since the 1930s. Then it was 25 cents an hour. Now it's $7.25 an hour. Isn't that nice? Liberals are so proud of themselves for "helping" working people. They can tell poor voters "we're your friends!"

As with most liberal ideas, they're substituting what feels good for what really works. Some people - especially high school age kids looking for that first job - just don't have $300 a week in marketable skills. Others don't put forth that much ambition or work effort. Consequently, employers are picky about bringing people on at this rate, while  they manage what they can give their current employees more carefully. So it may actually reduce the number of jobs out there. 

But more damaging, is the idea that we've done something for the working poor by creating this "minimum wage," the main effect of which is to drive up prices in the basic food and services sector where the poor spend most of their income - groceries, fast food, small retail. I think the Conservative answer to the liberals' next minimum wage increase ought to be "Heck, let's make it $30 an hour." Make them explain to the poor why they want the poor to remain poor. Let them tell people how easy it is to raise a family on $300 a week.  Let the liberals then explain why a "minimum" wage can't be too high. Let them be the bad guys.

Then, ask why the Republican controlled House hasn't hauled in Big Oil and the Administration to account for the high price of gasoline. It sure made headlines in 2008. Then haul in healthcare leaders and demand free medical treatment and immortality. Heck, Obama says he wants people to be healthy. What could be healthier than living forever? Let the liberals explain how that would upset social security. At some point then, they have to tell people to die.

Alas, none of this will happen.  Conservatives simply won't outdo the liberals in making foolish promises.  The liberals will continue to make conservatives look heartless and mean, while they enact policies that keep people poor and dependent.  It's been said that we could mail a check to every poor family in America sufficient to lift their standard of living for far less money than we're spending on the dozens of overlapping and redundant bureaucracies that aim to help the poor by making them a little less poor but certainly not lifting them out of poverty.  Here's a check for your family of four: let's say $24,000 for the year. And build in a provision for a smaller check for the people who are a little above the line, so that we don't reward sloth at the expense of those who work but just can't get ahead. But pay your own rent, buy your own food, and manage this money well, it's all you get. If they misuse it, then let the justice system work. We would need thousands fewer bureaucrats and managers to run these agencies. (Have you ever thought that if some miracle simply eliminated poverty, this would be so opposed to the interests of the poverty pimp welfare bureaucracies that they would try to stop it? If I woke up tomorrow multi-billionaire wealthy, I'd love to go to a small county or state and just give every welfare recipient a check from me, on the condition that they don't draw any more from the government. It would be fun to see what the "administrator" apparatchiks would do.)

Our two party system is growing into a one mind system, where all the insiders think alike, but differ in degree and little else. A very smart boss of mine once said, "If we're all thinking alike, then some of us aren't thinking." It's time for politicians to think.