Calhoun's Can(n)ons for August 5, 2013
How much extra would you be willing to pay for a Big Mac if
that extra amount got the person handing you your burger above the Federal
poverty level income?
That's the question The
Daily Beast asked on their website and they installed a McPoverty
Calculator that lets you try out the number of pennies needed to accomplish
that feat. (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/01/the-mcpoverty-calculator.html
)
It's a timely question since many of McDonald's and other fast
food workers from KFC and Burger King are staging protest strikes in several
cities around the country and Congress is being urged to raise the minimum wage,
which the Census Bureau sets at $23,000 for a family of four.
Naturally, McDonald's, which made $5 billion in profits this
year, cried poor and declared that if their workers got a pay raise, they'd go
broke and have to shutter their restaurants and throw people out of work. They
even went to far as to partner with Visa on a website with what they must have thought
was a helpful line-item budget for their
poverty-wage workers. Their
helpful advice was to get a second job, spend $0 for heating and pay $600 for
rent. All of which gave comedians a
field day and caused a good many people to blow their McCoffee through their
noses at McDonald's arrogant, clueless Marie Antoinette presumptions. ($600 for
rent? In New York
City? Really?)
Meanwhile, the usual suspects showed up: Conservative Talking Point Pols declared that
these minimum wages are just fine for these kinds of jobs since they're being
held by teenagers earning extra money for school. This was followed by Bleeding
Heart Liberals pointing out that the average fast-food worker is 29 years-old
and many of those have families to feed. Then the discussion degenerated into
the usual contemptuous rant about "moochers" who shouldn't have kids
they can't support. All followed by
conservatives' favorite false narrative about "job creators, "
a narrative that fails to understand that the wealthy CEO of McDonald's isn't
the job creator, the minimum-wage worker with a few extra coins in his jeans is
the real job creator, since he
doesn't park his money in offshore accounts, he spends it on more goods and services, all of which drives
our demand and supply economy.
Also lost in the squabbling is the unmistakable fact that
America has tragically shipped its well-paying jobs overseas, leaving it a
low-wage service economy and turned itself into Detroit -- A hollowed out shell
with the income disparity between the few haves and the many have-nots reaching
historic and unsustainable limits. Even rapper Jay Z, a man who knows something about vast wealth
and income disparity, observed on Bill Maher's "Real Time" show, that
he didn't want to scare the white folks, well, scare 'em just a little, but the
racial and economic disparity in this country will ultimately lead to problems
since you can crush people just so far and then you've got real trouble. A
sentiment expressed by Voltaire 150 years ago when he aptly observed,
"History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and
wooden shoes coming up."
While fast food workers are wearing sneakers, not wooden
shoes, the destabilizing stairway remains.
As does the Basic Question: What kind of society do We The People want
to live in? Detroit? Or MiddleVille,
USA, where a person
working full time takes home a living wage that can support himself and his
family. A place where society's wealth returns to the stabilizing middle, where
honest workers, not Wall Street Gamblers, have real value and get the breaks.
So what does it take to begin to create that decent society?
That's the question The Daily Beast asked: How much extra for a Big Mac are you
willing to pay to ensure that the person handing you your food has a chance at
a better life? According to their
McCalculator, it's twenty cents.
Twenty cents.
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