{"id":41936,"date":"2014-02-20T12:10:24","date_gmt":"2014-02-20T18:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=41936"},"modified":"2014-09-03T13:59:10","modified_gmt":"2014-09-03T18:59:10","slug":"why-does-the-dfl-hate-poor-urban-single-mothers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=41936","title":{"rendered":"Why Does The DFL Hate Poor Urban Single Mothers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw<\/a> this idea in “Think” “Progress”…:<\/p>\n

Five state lawmakers in Minnesota have decided to take on the \u201cMinimum Wage Challenge\u201d and live off of a typical budget for a worker who makes the federal minimum wage of $7.25.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…and I thought “I loved <\/em>that skit the first time I saw a bunch of upper-middle-class liberals pretend to be poor to advance their narrative the first time I saw it – when Barbara Ehrenreich did it!”<\/p>\n

Back during the high times of the early 2000’s, Democrats assuaged their self-righteousness about poverty by reading Ehrenreich’s\u00a0Nickeled And Dimed<\/em>. \u00a0Ehrenreich – an upper-middle-class congenital “progressive” who has lived her life by her parents’ dicta “never cross a picket line and never vote Republican” – made a great show of pretending to live as a minimum wage worker in various parts of the country.<\/p>\n

It was BS, of course. \u00a0Ehrenreich approached minimum wage life the way you might expect someone who’d never had to do it.<\/p>\n

And I wouldn’t expect much better from the DFLers that’ll be doing this iteration of the stunt:<\/p>\n

Rep. Frank Hornstein (D) told CBS Minnesota that it made him take more notice of his costs. \u201cAn orange juice was $1.79. That\u2019s not something that I would normally notice,\u201d he said after getting breakfast from McDonald\u2019s Dollar Menu. \u201cMaking the decision to take the bus today versus taking the car will save me a little money for dinner. For food,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Another lawmaker who lives far from the capitol, Rep. Shannon Savick (D), said, \u201cI can live on what they set for food. I don\u2019t eat a lot,\u201d but she worried about transportation. Where she lives, \u201cif you don\u2019t have a car, you don\u2019t go anywhere, because there is no public transportation. Driving will cost more than what they\u2019re allowing me.\u201d The other three participants are Democratic Reps. Karen Clark, John Lesch, Jason Metsa.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

And what exactly will these legislators be trying to do?<\/p>\n

The state has one of the lowest minimum wages in the country at $6.15 an hour, which means it gets trumped by the federal wage. A worker who puts in 40 hours a week at that level will earn just $290 before taxes. The challenge limits the lawmakers to $5 a day for food and $9 for transportation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meaning $210 a week (before taxes) on…what?<\/p>\n

It’s not an idle question. \u00a0When you’re poor – and I spent a good chunk of my 20s and early 30s as “low income”, and I’m happy to say I’m forgetting some of the finer points of that lifestyle – you either budget ruthlessly to your circumstances, or you flounder. \u00a0Or, often enough, both.<\/p>\n

But this stunt seems to assume that the minimum wage earners are heads of households. \u00a0Not teenagers living in Eden Prairie and working at Boston Market for pin money.<\/p>\n

But minimum wage workers are not, as a rule, adult heads of households – even their own.<\/p>\n

This table – from Heritage – shows the demographics of minimum wage workers as of 2012:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Check out the average income line: \u00a0most minimum wage earners, even those older than 25, are parts of households with average incomes averaging $26 an hour (including, it must be said, all of the DFLers in the stunt – who, presumably, won’t be eschewing their spouses’ incomes during the stunt).<\/p>\n

Upshot? \u00a0They are a third as likely to live in poverty as they are to live in a household over 150% of the poverty line.<\/p>\n

Most – even the older ones – work part-time, and they are 3-4 times as \u00a0likely as the general public not to have finished high school yet.<\/p>\n

So the push to hike the minimum wage will \u00a0benefit the Dairy Queen worker in Maple Grove – who at best will get a 40% raise, and at worst will spend more time playing “Grand Theft Auto” at home while bitching to their friends about getting laid off.<\/p>\n

It’ll directly harm the stereotype they claim they’re trying to help – the urban single parent who never finished high school because they were busy raising kids, and is part of that minority of minimum wage workers who don’t actually have a functional support system, a family to fall back on (like the legislators all do, even during the course of their weaselly little stunt).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw this idea in “Think” “Progress”…: Five state lawmakers in Minnesota have decided to take on the \u201cMinimum Wage Challenge\u201d and live off of a typical budget for a worker who makes the federal minimum wage of $7.25. …and I thought “I loved that skit the first time I saw a bunch of upper-middle-class […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,308],"tags":[283],"class_list":["post-41936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capitalism-v-socialism","category-entitled-america","tag-minimum-wage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41936"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46934,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41936\/revisions\/46934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}