The Police State & The Minimum Wage
Corporate media headline grabbing “presidential candidate” Donald Trump recently claimed raising the minimum wage would not help the nation stating:
“We can’t have a situation where our labor is so much more expensive than other countries’ that we can no longer win.”
Win what? Does Donald really want American workers to take jobs for less than 80 cents (China) or 28 cents (India) an hour? Besides the obvious this is exactly the type of thinking that contributes to our police state — and the largest prison population on the planet.
An over-simplified but common sense formula we know:
Poor Education Systems + Unemployment = Poverty = Crime
Aggressive policing and a massive prison system as a catch-all for
every social ill only exacerbates the problem — creating employment
barriers, making public benefits inaccessible, and disrupting
communities.
When we take the primary wage-earner from a family and from a
community and lock him up, what does that do to his family? His
community? The larger nation as a whole?
Let’s look briefly at Germany (not because they are a perfect country) simply because they recently introduced a higher minimum wage and “have not shown signs of suffering any economic blow”.
German workers also receive paid family leave, universal healthcare, and paid vacation. As a comparison, of 38 nations the US is the outlier when it comes to even the most basic civilized consideration of paid parental leave.
