It has been on my mind to respond to something a friend of mine posted earlier on here about minimum wage. When I first started working back in 1977 minimum wage was $1.75 an hour and gas was less than 50 cents a gallon. You could buy a 4 bedroom, two bathroom house for under $30,000, a person making $20,000 dollars a year was considered upper middle class. By the time I graduated from high school in 1981 minimum wage was $3:35 an hour, gas was about a dollar a gallon and those same houses were going for around 40 to 50 grand, and middle class standards were at about $35,000 a year. Those four years I was in high school were during the Jimmy Carter administration as president and during that time he raised minimum wage, raised taxes, and brought on a very tough recession that did not start to go away until two years after Ronald Reagan took office. My point is that this all goes back to inflation. Inflation is not something that is generated by greedy business, but rather government policies like trying to redistribute wealth and the whole debt crisis perpetuated by predatory lending. When a very large percentage of the population is taking care of the needy few society can handle the burden, but when government endeavors to punish those that have, and take it away to take care of an ever increasing number of needy the money has got to come from somewhere so people raise their prices on goods and services. Also when prices get so high that people don’t have ready funds to buy more expensive items a whole new system is added to the equation called financing. In the Bible it is called usury, where money is lended to buy something and a percentage is added to the payback. Back in the 1950s was the first time banks started lending for cars. Before that time banks basically only made business and home ownership loans. Today you can practically finance anything, including a toothbrush. Also you can get pay day loans, where for a sizable percentage one can borrow money from their Friday paycheck on Monday. All this drives the daily cost of living up. As things get too hairy raising the minimum wage starts to look like a very good idea to the guy who is at that level. What I don’t like about it is that within a very short time everything catches up with that raise and the person actually ends up with less buying power than before the wage was forced up by Government. Then the individual is forced to seek alternative means of income or help. Way too many turn to the government to supplement their ever decreasing means to support them selves and this puts the government in a position to raise taxes. Sooner or later another set of politicians will get the idea to raise minimum wage again and the whole thing just recycles itself over and over again. I am not saying that raising minimum wage is the only catalyst to inflation, but I am saying it is one of the major ones. When minimum wage goes up again (and I have no doubt but that it eventually will), watch prices everywhere, they will go up on just about everything. Inflation is not progress, it is not a natural progression of society that I paid 50 cents to go to a movie when I was a child and now I pay 8 dollars, and some day my grand kids will pay 50 dollars, it is a sickness. It is an artificially generated phenomena that will eventually destroy any society. Do I support another minimum wage hike, no. Why, because I don’t want to pay more for everything else, and have to charge more for every thing I sell. I don’t want to pay more taxes, I don’t want my grand kids going to the movie for $50 a pop. Etc, etc. Will it probably happen yes, do I like it no. Oh yes I know that when someone post something like this they usually get a lot of flack, oh well, its just my opinion.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 19:05:23 +0000
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