I am choosing to end where I began. Showing the absolute absurd foundation upon which Matt Walsh drove this article. That 29K per year is "living comfortably." I know that a lot of what Walsh wrote rings true for many who have had to struggle as he did in his personal anecdote. I paid my way through college working in gas stations making $5 an hour because that was the minimum wage at the time. Matt Walsh makes the assumption that this is somehow not only acceptable but desirable. I work under the premise that we should be able to do better. My struggles in life do not make me wish that everyone else has the same struggles. I will not get angry or envious if a fast food worker makes $15 an hour. I have worked with the urban poor for over 20 years. There are no welfare queens. There are no arrogant fast food workers petulantly demanding more than they are worth. These are images created by the super rich to rile up the working poor against the completely impoverished. Then when someone actually says this, says the truth, they have the temerity to cry "class warfare."
I do not know if $15 an hour will solve everything. Maybe it can be less and maybe it should be more. I do know this; when the mere suggestion of paying poor people more money results in the "experts" predicating the end of our capitalist utopia, I know someone doth protest too much. A study just released shows that these poverty wages cost the US taxpayers 153 billion dollars annually to subsidize through governmental programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. Do we understand that? So a company like McDonalds can make almost 28 billion dollars per year but pay their workers so little that they have to be subsidized by the average taxpayer to the tune of 153 billion more. Not to mention the macroeconomic fact that paying people on the low end more money will also dump more money into the economy. People making the "comfortable" 29K per year are still not saving anything. They certainly are not investing anything. They still live from paycheck to paycheck, putting the lettuce on Matt Walsh's Big Mac.
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