More Criticism Of “30 Days”
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Social ProgramsThis time from In The Agora:
According to the Labor Department’s 2004 “Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers,” approximately 59% of the working population in the US is paid at hourly rates. Of those, only 2.7% make minimum wage or less. Only 1.7% of hourly workers over 25 are paid minimum wage. Notice that the number of workers making at or below minimum wage is significantly smaller than it was just 10 years ago. Moreover, an overwhelming number of those considered to be “poor” in the US will move out of that category within one year. (In case anyone was wondering, approximately 6.5% of the French population cannot afford to purchase all the necessary resources required for living.)
Still, I don’t think this post gets the point. This issue is about struggling day in and day out with no end in sight.
Some say that hiking the minimum wage will cripple our economy. Fair enough. But I wonder if you checked how much it costs us each year to keep the kids of low income single moms in prison and compared it to the cost of small increases to the minimum wage if it was even.
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 19th, 2005 and is filed under Social Programs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 8th, 2006 at 2:38 am
Good job.