Lovin' It Yet?

Minimum wage workers at various McDonald's are staging a protest over their crappy minimum wage which keeps them working full time but getting poverty wages.  Conservatives claim that McJobs like those at McDonald's are held by teenagers.  Liberals point out that the average worker is 29 years old, likely married and even working full time is still at the poverty level for a family of four. 

McDonald's had a profit somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 billion last year, so it's certainly clear that they COULD raise wages for their workers, if they weren't so greedy. But since they are so greedy, like most of their corporate brethren, to get workers a pay hike, they claim they'd have to charge more for their crappy, artery-clogging, diabetes-causing McFood, (since the CEO's couldn't possibly take so much as one penny less of their gazillion dollar salaries and perks) .  So over at The Daily Beast, there's a McPoverty Calculator. 
 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/01/the-mcpoverty-calculator.html

If you click on the link, you can plug in how much extra you'd pay for a Big Mac to get McDonald's workers a wage that had a shot of getting them closer to a living wage.  Go ahead.  Take the challenge.  It's a real shock to find out how little it takes to help someone else live a more decent life. (And, by the way, help the economy, since low-wage workers put that money immediately back into the economy, not into off-shore accounts.)

It's also a shock to find out that a Big Mac Costs $4.56.  Are you kidding me?  $4.56?