Ted Rall for February 25, 2013

If it had kept pace with inflation, the minimum would be some $21.50/hr.How can you work full-time, and still be below the poverty line? And the CEO pulls in (even a few) millions? (Yeah, yeah, tell me again how his brain is gold and he’s worth it. Now pull the other one!)

Oh, where’s Gerald? I’m sure he’d like a word with Rall about this. He’d probably Wax his ears with no uncertain libertarian terms. Or is that Wax lyrically?

Michael: Best sarcasm I’ve seen in a long time. And I agree. Neither side currently believes in getting many people out of poverty. Dems need their votes, and Repubs need the “job creator” votes.

I give capitalism another 20 years max.

Minimum wage was, at its onset, not meant to be a ‘living wage’. It was a wage to be paid to teenagers and college students still living at home or for an adult working to supplement the wages of the primary wage earner in the home. It has quickly evolved to a source of paying for rent, food, heat/cooling, healthcare, clothing, etc. for households with children. To a large degree, I blame the loopholes written into the various free trade agreements that make it so profitable for US companies to make products overseas to sell back to the USA. That was not what Mr. Reagan told me NAFTA would do, but it is what has happened. Mr. Rall’s cartoon reminds me the state of my childhood, Mississippi, has finally completed all processes to ratify the amendment ending slavery in the USA. They actually did it in 1995, but the paperwork wasn’t properly filed until Abraham Lincoln’s bday this very month and year. The gears of gov’t move very, very, VERY slow.Tiredly,C.

Yeah, and they almost lost a $400 hand car! Truly hilarious film, and certainy had fun with the stereotypes of the times. (BTW, they finally accepted the Irish…)

Actually, Minimum Wage is the lowest amount of money than an employer can legally get away with paying an employee and it really doesn’t matter what that employee does, because if they bring the employer a million-dollar idea that makes the employer a lot of money, the only legal obligation that the employer really has to the employee is that they be paid the least amount of money possible.…And that is where the Minimum Wage comes in, protecting the employee from getting ripped off by their employer, because if your employer could get away with not paying you for the work you do for them, they would.…And if you think that isn’t happening out there, work in an “on-call” capacity for your employer, where you are basically sitting and waitng for a call to come in and that you may be in a legal status called “waiting, to be engaged” as opposed to “engaged, to be waiting”.…And the distinction in those two terms is that the latter is compensable time at regular time rates according to the US Department of Labor and the courts, while the former is not compensable, meaning that your employer can ask you to sacrifice your time on-call for them and get away with not paying you for it.…And when we deal with a workplace situation where there is such a thing as “telecommuting” and “work from home” out there, there will always be this “gray area” out there where employers will look to getting away with exploiting the labors of their employees without compensating the employee, or even compensating the employee adequately for that labor and for that time—time that the employee set aside from their own lives and families and sacrificed to the employer, that the employee will never get back and never be paid for.

I’m going to stick up for lma this time. The line was Mel Brooks’, not lma’s. I’d call it satire in the tradition of Swift’s A Modest Proposal, in which he suggested the Irish could solve their problems of food shortage & overpopulation by eating their babies.“Blazing Saddles” was satirizing how little value African Americans had, even in post slavery times. Brooks wasn’t just making fun of 1870s cowboys, he was making fun of attitudes that still existed in the 1970s.

The taxpayer subsidies help.

None of the characters in our little play is factoring in the cost of the slave(s) to begin with. Besides, the point of buying slaves it that the slave owner DID NOT PAY his slaves. The slave owner just works the slave(s) to death and then buys new ones. So, unless Ted is trying to equate gainful employment (the dollar) to slavery (the whip), then the cartoon makes no sense. If Ted is making such a case, he should try out the difference (between the dollar and the whip) on his own back!

Another tangent on history. One of the reasons slavery went on as long as it did was not because there wasn’t a call for the end on the humanitarian -civil rights issues. There were people calling for the end to slavery (the Abolitionists) as early as the 1830’s. It was those greedy cotton mill owners in the North that politically “kept kicking the can down the road.” For many years they contended that it would be “disastrous” to the North’s economy if they ended slavery and impacted the cheap cotton from the South. Of course many failed to mention that wages paid at the North’s cotton mills were one small step above slavery.

I can remember the minimum wage.1968 Burger King $1.25 an hour. Worked 8 hours made less than 8 dollars after taxes. And still had to file state and federal income tax. I owed them.Military service 1972. Got $125 per month to go to Nam and lob grenades at people. As the song says Dirty Deeds Done Dirty Cheap.BUT things were far less expensive back then.Fill’er up took about 5 dollars max and they checked the oil and cleaned the windshield and aired the tires.Cars could be under 3,000 bucks (those were Cadillac). (I paid 1760 bucks for a new Ford Pinto AC, power, good motor. Payment 65 a month. In the Army that was half my danged pay check) Homes (nice ones) under 10,000. No money down.$2 dollars a day could feed most people but you would be surprised at the numbers making less than that back then.That’s okay with me. Chinese are going to own us all in the end anyway. Let them try to collect.As the Grateful Dead said“Every silver lining has a touch of grey” and I will be all right.

First “paid” job: $1 per day. When I got first job at $1 per HOUR, I thought it was great!

When I got that $1 per hour job, a new car was $3,200, the same equivalent model today is $32,000, maybe time to increase the minimum? Also, consider that those CEO types not make 500 or more times the “salary” of the average worker and we know it’s the cost of labor destroying America.

I’m not so much troubled by the fact that some people are rich — but what I see is that ordinary working people — people who work hard at necessary jobs — live with a lot of financial insecurity. That really bothers me. What are the major concerns? Well, I would guess one is the cost of health care, one is the fear of growing old without enough money, and another is the problem of putting your kids through college without going into big time debt. All of these can be solved easily enough.

I just saw a clip where John Kerry says Americans have a right to be stupid. That’s okay — what troubles me is that some people seem to think stupidity is not just a right of American citizenship, but an obligation.