It's Not About "Burger Flippers" It's About The Devalued Dollar

I'm sure many of you have seen the memes (or variations thereof) shown below on social media over the past few months. The one on the top is more than a bit disingenuous because it presupposes that first responders only get minimum wage and that they do not complain. There's a similar one comparing "burger flippers" with United States soldiers which is also disingenuous because it ignores the fact that soldiers are grossly under paid and under benefited as well! The bottom meme is closer to what has actually happened - the decline of buying power by the U.S. dollar and the MSM ignoring inflation, the second great depression and the impact that this had on tens of millions of Americans.

 

 

 

 

Many moons ago when I was working a part-time minimum wage job for $3.10 an hour while in college I was able to afford to share a 2 bedroom apartment, had a savings account and didn't need food stamps. Six months later, I was out of college and bumped up the gravy train to $3.50 an hour and more than 30 hours a week. Then I was paying back my student loan and still had the savings account, paid rent, paid for my food, paid for clothes, et al. My point is that the buying power of the dollar has dramatically decreased over the years and inflation (which they used to report on the nightly news by the way) is going through the roof.

 

I noticed that almost no one was bitching and moaning when McDonald's CEO was given a 4+ times raise last year, but raise the minimum wage and howls are made mostly from the right-wing, economists and filthy rich people. So, with minimum wage workers on food stamps, child welfare, housing welfare etc., you'd rather argue that subsidizing these high-profit, low wage corporations is all right for American taxpayers? A $15 an hour wage would cut food stamps rolls and all the rest. It's that simple. This isn't about pimply faced teenagers or retirees, this is about corporate welfare at the expense of working Americans and the fact that the dollar doesn't buy nearly as much as it use to.

 

If you are still fixated on the "burger flipper" in spite of reading this far, consider this: the average fast food "value meal" costs about $7.50. It would take an employee at said fast food establishment one hour's worth of wages to afford that. Even the self-serving, bigoted car magnate Henry Ford understood he had to pay his employees enough of a wage to afford the cars they built.