About 8 years ago I was getting a little frustrated with our
financial advisor (not the good one we have now – Todd Lansing at 40 West
Financial) who seemed perplexed that we were planning to pay for our children's
college education - or at least as much of that as we could afford. In exasperation I responded after the 3rd or
4th probing into why would we want to delay our own retirement by doing this
and I responded with...
"There's something about 'Do
you want fries with that?' that I just don't want to hear from my kids mouths
when they are 25."
Now there is nothing wrong with working in a fast food
joint, giant retail stores, cleaning offices or hotel rooms, or any number of
other low paying, and so called low skilled jobs. These jobs exist because we need them to be
done. We call them low skill – but the
truth is even with training, some of us with higher paying jobs would not be
very good at them. But the powerful info-graphic accessible from the link below shows the growing and often to many
insurmountable problem we are running into in the United States.
We have a large group of people in the USA – mostly people who have
somehow gained the benefit of some opportunity and more often than not, hard
work, who think anyone who does not have what they have simply doesn’t deserve
it for any number of reasons. Most commonly
I perceive that in their opinion these people who have “less” do so simple
because they don’t work hard enough for it.
What a complete and utter pile of BS.
My wife makes less than a third of what I do, and she works every bit as
hard. Many of the parents of children in
her school both work, both harder than she or I do holding down two or three
jobs paying minimum wage or close to it, most not providing a full 40 hours and often no benefits, and all that just to maybe get paid what my wife alone does.
Looking at the info-graphic we see for example that the
average wage earned in the Accommodation and Food Services sector was in
2014 some $20,495. This is the AVERAGE
mind you – with almost two thirds of those working in this sector making less
than twenty thousand a year. Twenty
thousand you say – well these are entry level jobs – they are for teenagers and
such – they ought to be happy to gain the experience working so they can move
up… except the average age of these people making on average $20K a year (the
majority something less) is almost 33 years old. I was married with two children when I was 33
years old! I do hope for their sake that
their big break into something better comes soon!!!
But that’s the problem – the something better jobs are
harder and harder to find. Even with the college degrees (one down, one in progress) there are no guarantees anymore. Sure – you could
maybe do better in the Retail Trade sector – they average just over $30K a
year, although nearly half are still not even making $20K. But these two sectors dominate the new jobs
created – the ones our politicians and president like to crow about. As someone was quoted during a previous
administration that liked to brag on the job growth – “Yeah – I believe there
have been so many new jobs created – I’ve had several of them!”
So we keep refusing to pay people a so called “living wage”. What is that anyway – I guess I like to think
of it as what the US fought so hard to get away from – or did it? Heck we have debtors prisons and at less than
$20K a year – indentured servant-hood might look good to many. Here in Colorado, the average cost of a two
bedroom apartment requires a 40 hours a week job paying nearly $20/hr to pay
the rent and be considered affordable (affordable defined as no more than 30%
of income). This is almost the same as
the national average. Thank goodness
some 22 “states” (of 52 including DC and Puerto Rico) require on average less
that the $15/hr we fight so hard for and against. Not much less generally – only two are less
than $13/hr – and one of those is poverty stricken and near bankrupt Puerto
Rico. To put it a different way, to afford
the average rent on a two bedroom apartment in all states at the prevailing
minimum wage in that state you simply can’t get there at 40 hours a week. In fact – you can’t even do it with one and a
half jobs – unless again, you live in Puerto Rico. In only 16 of the 52 “states” can you
affordably rent an average two bedroom apartment with less than 2 full time
minimum wage jobs.
You can check out the housing affordability at a web site
published by the National Low Income Housing Coalition at:
What embarrasses me tremendously as a follower of Jesus is
the damning picture painted in a particular graphic from the report on the Out
of Reach site. It shows the number of
hours work per week at prevailing minimum wage for an average apartment to be
affordable – and it highlights the states (*) where the prevailing minimum is
higher than the federally mandated minimum (a generous according to some $7.25
per hour). With a few exceptions, the
states that have not mandated a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum
are “the bible belt”. Well done “Christians”
in looking out for "the least of these".
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| Source: http://nlihc.org/oor |
