I haven't seen any surveys or studies to back this up, but I have noticed that people who are not education oriented are being denied a livable wage in the workplace. For years I have been listening to democrats rail that a family of four cannot live on the amount they earn working for the minimum wage. Duh! Yes that is true and hopefully it will always be true. Democrats have loused up the definition of 'family' to the point that it is difficult to know what a family is, so for the purpose of this discussion a 'family' of four is a mom and a dad, and in this example two kids.
Even if both parents are working the minimum wage will be inadequate. What democrats seem oblivious too is the fact that no one working for a minimum wage can support him/herself, let alone a family of four. At least not where I live. Minimum wage in California is $15.50 an hour. A full time employee is anyone working thirty hours a week. That works out to about $2015.00 a month. Just to rent a room in the area where I live costs $1200.00 a month and that's if you share a bathroom with another renter in the same house. And it doesn't include meals or a kitchen. Rents can be about two hundred dollars less if one shares a room with another person and fortunately usually the room is furnished.
Maybe a single person can live on that while they work their way up the ladder if they are allowed to work full time, but there are no employers here that will give an employee a thirty hour schedule. Some people work two jobs to make up the deficit, but a lot of employers don't even care about that. They won't allow an employee the flexibility to let them know what days they are available to work so they end up losing one job and keeping the other, and sleeping in their worn out car.
So what is the solution? The most obvious solution is to encourage employers to pay people at least enough money that they can afford to rent a one bedroom or studio apartment close to the location where they work. One possible roadblock I found is the so-called America Care Act. This cruel joke of a law forces employers to provide insurance for anyone who works thirty hours in a week. Democrats! Want to make sure everyone has health insurance? Simple; just force someone barely getting by himself to pay for it. Of course there is an alternative, employers can just hire more people and make sure they don't make the thirty hour threshold. That way employers can keep more of their money to be used to comply with government regulations that are required in order to operate a business. There isn't a greater job killer than a government bureaucracy.
Why should men and women who are vastly underpaid be forced to live in their cars while they eek out a bare subsistence? Before Obamacare, when Americans were allowed to work a forty hour week without anyone being forced to pay a government imposed penalty, an individual could earn enough, even on minimum wage to pay for a small apartment. And why do people continue to vote democrat? First of all, probably just out of habit and we all know that a bad habit is hard to break, and second because people believe the lies they are told by democrats because it all sounds so wonderful. Lots of people believe it when some candidate promises to take care of everyone's needs from the day they are born to the day they die. Nancy Pelosi even advocated that we should pay people a couple of thousand dollars a month so they could pursue their dreams of becoming an artist or a writer. She's got hundreds of millions of dollars why doesn't she open a facility for people with those aspirations? Probably even she doesn't believe the garbage that falls out of her mouth, but it gets votes. I haven't attempted to navigate the health insurance exchanges but I'm reliably informed that they are difficult to understand and untangle.
Do you want a high premium and low copayment, or low premium and high copay and just hope you never get sick? And which one covers the prescription your child needs? And since we are over regulating the industry why don't we pass a law requiring all insurance carriers to cover whatever prescription a person needs? Who even knows which illness is going to find them and which prescription they will need?
I have an idea. On the day Obamacare was scribbled into law millions of Americans lost their health insurance and that is not propaganda from Fox News it is the whole truth. Of course you never heard that on the other so-called news channels, those who are actually in the propaganda business, because they are hard core democrats/socialists. And every American became subject to a fine for not signing up for one of the insurance frauds offered by the Obama fanatics on that day too. And now we are experiencing an explosion of homeless people on the street. Many of them are in dire need of medical attention due to genetic mental illness and they should be institutionalized for their own good as well as the safety of the general population. Others are drug addicts and alcoholics. Let's put drug addicts on the back burner for now. Then there is another portion who are homeless because although they are willing to work, and there are jobs available, they cannot even afford a studio apartment to live in. Why don't democrats find a way to persuade employers to give their employees more work hours. Let's modify the ACA so people can earn a good living. Let them work a forty hour week if they want. Give them their dignity back. Keep the minimum wage the same, just tell the boss to let his people work enough hours so they can afford a place where they can go after work, take a shower, cook a meal, watch MSNBC so they can see how bitchin their democrat rep is, get some sleep and get back to work? People would stay on the job longer because they wouldn't keep getting fired for being late or missing a shift altogether. Or even a Republican. Somebody could do something to help homeless people earn enough money to live in a decent home. We used to do it and we should learn from that. Let Americans work and it is amazing what they will accomplish.
In many cases they cannot even afford to rent a room in someone else's house. Why don't they live with mom and dad? Who the hell knows, and why should a healthy adult be forced to do that?
SOLUTION?
Why not scrap the thirty hour work week and the fine for not carrying health insurance and allow Americans the basic and necessary opportunity to earn enough money to at least provide themselves the minimum type of housing? We shouldn't allow the government to dictate to us how much money we can earn or to force our employers to provide health insurance. Yes medical needs can be and are expensive, but another fact about living in America is that we all have to opportunity to work, earn and live. Supposedly we are to be free from government interference in our lives and that is a good thing. In the United States of America we pride ourselves on our own abilities and don't want any government official telling us what we can or cannot do as long as we aren't harming other people.
And another truth that democrats hate to admit is the fact that Obamacare began as a lie and remains a lie. I personally know people who are stuck with Obamacare and are still paying as much as a thousand dollars a month for life saving medications for their children. Some pharmacies will subsidize those medications for awhile, but the term always expires even though the illness remains. Democrats are so compassionate that they can accept a certain built in mortality rate as long as they can claim that they are 'helping' people find health insurance.
Getting the Feds out of our lives would solve a lot of our problems. Letting Americans be Americans would solve a lot of our problems. People need to stop worrying about who is going to pay for their expenses and spend more time thinking of ways they can pay their own expenses and government should be encouraging that.
If we want to relieve some of the stress of homelessness we would encourage companies to pay their people full time pay for full time work. Allow Americans the opportunity to earn a good living and get off their back. If government would simply step aside and allow people room to breathe we could solve so many more problems than are solved by over zealous officials. Forcing Americans to do things they shouldn't need to do, and enforcing those ridiculous laws at bayonet point is wrong, counter productive and stupid.
People who work for a living should be paid at least enough for one person to be able to rent a small apartment they can call home and still be able to eat. State senators should tour the businesses in their districts and find out how employees are being paid before deciding how much a state minimum wage should be, if one is needed at all. There are some young people who no longer live at home and need to work to support themselves, there is no way a young person living in California can survive on the state minimum wage. The average rent in Los Angeles is over $2700.00. The California minimum wage is $15.50 and that works out to be just over $2,000.00 for a person working full time which democrats have decided is thirty hours a week. Even a democrat should be able to see that a person cannot rent an apartment and have money for groceries at that rate.
So where do they end up? In fifteen year old Nissans that barely run or tents on the sidewalk when the Nissan gets towed for a parking violation because it stopped running. The owners of companies claim they cannot afford to pay their employees a livable wage while they sit in their mansions and collect paychecks in the millions of dollars. Those men and women need to think about where they would be if people stopped working for a pauper's wage, which many have.
REVOLUTION
Most people don't want to fight a revolution and it shouldn't be necessary. The most recent news item I read dealt with the CEO of McDonalds who is paid a mere seven and a half million dollars a year. He said that paying their employees would impose a substantial hardship on the company. The people who work for McDonalds should at least be paid well enough to be able to afford a small apartment instead of being forced to live in their cars or on the sidewalk.
In the eighteenth century in the United States unions organized workers into collectives that could force employers to pay them a dignified wage. Few people if any are saying the head of the company shouldn't be well compensated, it is the boss that is claiming that the people at the bottom should be happy that they have enough to eat; who really needs an apartment to live in anyway? I suppose people who don't have the ability to become corporate bosses deserve to live in tents on city sidewalks. The first labor strike that I can find was in New York in 1794 when a group of tailors rejected a decrease in their wages. Since then there have been many labor unions that sometimes were forced to turn to violence to get what they deserved.
During the Industrial Revolution some industrialists hired their own security forces who would beat striking employees with clubs, sometimes beating them to death and some of the security forces actually used guns to kill people on strike. Today union bosses seem to be a little too friendly with the CEO's of large corporations, largely ignoring entry level laborers. In the good old days some union bosses provided clubs and even firearms on occasion to even the playing field with the security forces of the big companies. Now the union bosses rarely seem to even know how much an entry level employee is paid. To be fair to union bosses there are still a lot of businesses that haven't unionized. I don't know what it takes to form a union, but people who want to be treated fairly and maintain their dignity should look into it. And bosses who don't like unions need to find ways to allow their employees the opportunity to live a decent life. They don't have to buy them houses, but how about allowing them the opportunity to at least live in a small studio apartment with a kitchen and running water instead of a tent or a cardboard box on the sidewalk?
The hourly wage only tells a small part of the story. The number of hours people are allowed to work helps provide a more accurate picture. You cannot ignore housing costs when deciding how much entry level employees are paid. If a studio apartment costs two thousand a month the employee needs to paid a sufficient amount to be able to find a place to live and still have money for basic needs like food. When people realize they are not being treated with proper respect by the boss they need to organize and teach the boss how to act. If I were still at the entry level workplace position and I couldn't afford even a lousy apartment I'd be shopping around for unions to join.
The millionaires and even billionaires will pay better if they are 'persuaded' to do so by the people who help provide the lavish lifestyle they enjoy. And if company executives don't want to have to deal with union regulations, which sometimes are burdensome, then they should take a closer look at the abuse they are heaping on their employees. Look at the tent cities and people living in old cars parked on the street. Those are your employees, the people who pay for your mansions and yachts and jets can't even afford to live in a 850 square foot apartment. American corporations can do better and they should do better. If their franchisees can't afford to pay for labor then the corporate structure is wrong.
There are enough employers who do pay a livable wage that corporate execs should be able to figure it out. I know small business owners who take an interest in their employees and pay them enough to live in an apartment instead of the street. Those employers live a comfortable life, but they don't live in twenty room mansions and fly around the world in private jets. They are content with twelve rooms and flying first class.
When looking for a solution for the homeless crisis it would probably pay to check with the people on the street and find out why they are in the position they are in. There are lots of businesses constantly looking for people to work, it could be that even the people they hire are living in tents along busy streets and public parks and if an employer doesn't care enough about the things his employees do for him he's going to lose them.
Of seven 'studies' I just read about dealing with homelessness none of them included questions about what, exactly, do homeless people need to help them get back on their feet. What didn't surprise me was the fact that there are a lot of homeless people who are not strung out on drugs. Many of them were laid off from job that paid well and now they can't even find a job that pay enough to live in a small apartment. Many of them did report significant health issues and those could probably be addressed fairly simply, possibly by allowing doctors, nurses and other medical professionals including dentists, with significant student loans, to work them off by providing time one or two days a month to help people in crisis. There is a solution to this problem but it will have to come from the private sector and that is a challenge. Which billionaire will be willing to provide some long term assistance for these unfortunate people. They need to have a transitional place to live, a job that pays them at least well enough to rent a small apartment, and maybe assistance with filling out an application for a job online.
With the planet supposedly about to explode from the pressures of man made global warming, in ten to three hundred years, or maybe never, no one seems to have time to solve a problem that is occurring every day right in front of them. I think of how much real good an RFK Jr. could do or a John Kerry if they put their minds to a real problem like helping homeless people get back into the work force. But if they 'wasted' their time doing that they might not have time to fly around the world socializing with the billionaires of Europe, Asia, and South America pretending to solve a problem that is well on its way to solving itself. What if the department of Housing and Urban Development took a serious interest in helping people in urban settings find housing? Their budget is almost two billion dollars a year and they can't figure out a way to teach businessmen why they should pay their employees enough to live in a decent apartment?
We could reduce the number of people living on the street by just using our imagination a little more, thinking big, and getting American corporations to take a look at how they are paying their people. Fifteen bucks and hour might be a great wage in some parts of the country, but in Los Angeles you might as well just pass out tents and cardboard boxes because they sure aren't going to be living in a secure location. Bring back the forty hour work week. It doesn't matter what works for Europeans, we live in the USA and we do things differently, we do things better.
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