[Vision2020] You can live on $5.15 per hour? Try it sometime

[Tom Hansen]

>From today's (June 23, 2006) Lewiston Tribune with a special thanks to Tom
Henderson.

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You can live on $5.15 per hour? Try it sometime 

Tom Henderson
Give Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., a broom. Let him sweep up the Russell
Senate Office Building for $5.15 per hour. 

Then see if he still thinks the federal minimum wage is fine as it is. 

Isakson is one of the Senate Republicans who spoke out against increasing
the minimum wage Wednesday. He says an increase would hurt the working poor.


What does he know about being poor? 

Forget the $165,200 he pulls in as a senator. The man is a multimillionaire,
with eight pages of stock holdings ranging from Microsoft and General
Electric to Georgia companies like Coca Cola and Home Depot. 

Among Isakson's larger holdings is stock in Wachovia Bank, valued at between
$1 million and $5 million and Main Streets Bank stock worth between $250,001
and $500,000. 

Isakson is also a stockholder in a number of retail favorites like
Starbucks, Liz Claiborne, Toys-R-Us and Bed Bath and Beyond. 

Isakson makes the rich man's argument against increasing the minimum wage.
It thwarts the miracle of the open market. 

''For every increase you make in the minimum wage, you will cost some of
them [the working poor] their jobs," he says. 

He describes the conflict as a ''classic debate between two very different
philosophies. One philosophy believes in the marketplace, the competitive
system and entrepreneurship. And secondly is the argument that says
government knows better and that top-down mandates work." 

Right. Go tell the single mother working three jobs how the American Way
demands she be kept on slave wages. 

Increasing the minimum wage hurts the poor? Go peddle it somewhere else. 

Idaho's red-state political establishment keeps the minimum wage at the
federally required $5.15 per hour. Right next door, Washington has the
highest minimum wage in the country at $7.63 per hour. Oregon isn't too far
behind at $7.50 per hour. 

How many people think the working poor are better off in Idaho? 

Yet Senate Republicans carried the day, shooting down a minimum-wage
increase 52-46. This is the ninth time since 1997. Democrats there have
proposed -- and Republicans have blocked -- a stand-alone increase in the
minimum wage. 

Unbelievable. 

A job should lift you out of poverty, not keep you in it. 

A worker paid $5.15 an hour earns $10,700 per year -- almost $6,000 below
the poverty line for a family of three. And Republicans think people can
live on those wages? 

They ought to try it sometime.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"Uh, how about a 1-strike law. Death doesn't seem too extreme for a Level-3
sex offender."

- Dale "Comb-Over" Courtney (August 3, 2005)