Time for a Maximum Wage

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News
14 July 12

Reader Supported News | Perspective



uring a February 1934 radio address, when unemployment and economic inequality were both rampant, Louisiana Senator Huey Long said, "We do not propose to say that there shall be no rich men. We do not ask to divide the wealth. We only propose that, when one man gets more than he and his children and his children's children can spend or use in their lifetimes, then we shall say that such person has his share."

There is no state in the union where someone working a minimum-wage job for 40 hours a week, or $15,080 a year, can afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market value.

At the opposite end of the financial spectrum, Mitt Romney made $15,080 every 6 hours in 2010, when he grossed over $21 million in income. It would take a minimum-wage worker 1,436 years and 10 months to make what Mitt Romney made in 2010.

If that hasn't sunk in yet, I'll say it differently. To make as much as Mitt Romney made in one year, a minimum-wage worker working 40 hours a week for $7.25 an hour would have to start work during the Liang Dynasty and work all the way to the present day. Assuming an average life expectancy of 65 years, since minimum-wage workers can't get the same nutrition and health care that everyone else can, that's 22 entire lifetimes of nonstop minimum-wage work, from infancy to death, just to make what one man made in one year.

Guys as rich as Mitt Romney make money for having money. He doesn't simply work for a living, but rather acquires wealth from investments already made with previously accumulated wealth. While a minimum-wage worker pays a third of their income in sales, property, payroll and excise taxes, Mitt Romney pays just a 13.9% tax rate on more than half of his income, because it comes from capital gains, instead of good old-fashioned hard work.

http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/274-41/12415-time-for-a-maximum-wage