The Minimum Wage

by Miles Mathis 

First published January 12, 2020

I just tripped across some minimum wage stats in researching something else, and was shocked. No, scratch that. Not shocked. I am past being shocked by anything. I am very far from being numb, and I found this very saddening, but "shocked" is the wrong word. I now understand the predatory nature of the ruling class, and this is just one more instance of that. What is a bit awe- inspiring, however, is that the levels of predation of the upper classes on the lower have gotten so much greater in the past 40 years. Since the rich weren't doing badly 40 years ago, there is really no excuse for it.

What turned my head was discovering the minimum wage for tipped employees (like waiters) is now $2.13/hr. When I was waiting tables in college, it was $2.00/hr. That was 36 years ago. That's a 6% rise in 36 years. Do you know how much inflation we have had in that time? About 300%, or 4x (4 times). What cost $1 then now costs $4. Meaning? That $2.13 is really worth about 53 cents. Or, waiters now are getting paid about 1/4th what I was getting paid in 1984.

That makes it kind of hard to work your way through college, doesn't it? Especially since college tuition has risen far faster than inflation. More than 3 times faster. College is about 10 times more expensive now than it was when I attended, so if a waiter is now using his wages to pay for college, he is getting paid about 1/9th of what I was getting paid. Or, to say it another way, his $2.13 feels to him like what 24 cents would have felt like to me. By 1984 college standards, we are now paying waiters less than 25 cents an hour.

Do you think that is an accident? No, of course not. That is the way the bankers want it, because they don't want anyone working his way through college anymore. They want you or your parents to take out ruinous loans, so that you can be made a wage-slave for life. You will say many of these loans are government loans, but that is just a dodge. The bankers own the government and the Federal Reserve, so they are the ones making money here, not the treasury. It is all one more huge scam, papered over as a beneficial government program.

What about the regular minimum wage? That is now at $7.25/hr, but the encyclopedia sites admit even that isn't enforced by the Feds. Many States ignore it and the Feds look the other way. When one guy in Ruby Ridge refuses to turn in a gun, they send in the 11th battalion, but when entire States refuse to pay their workers, no one budges. Why? Because the governments are owned by the billionaires, and the billionaires are quite happy to see people working for nothing. Even now they think wages are too high, and they prefer to take their factories to China or somewhere, where they can pay even less.

These people also own and manage places like Wikipedia, and if you visit the page there for minimum wage, they assault you with thousands of excuses, equations, studies, and arguments for why a low minimum wage is good for employment, good for workers, good for competitiveness, blahblahblah. But no one awake should believe it. Anyone over about 12 should be able to figure out that they pay workers less so they can keep more. It isn't rocket science. And that is exactly what we see: while real wages have been plummeting over the past four decades, corporate profits have gone through the roof. Since the last "recession" in 2007, the wealthy have gotten about eight times wealthier as a whole. In the last 13 years, the billionaires have quadrupled their wealth. . . twice.

They try to tell you this is due to their managerial brilliance—see the constant horn-tooting for Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos—but it is really just institutionalized theft. The rich are stealing from the poor with evermore abandon, and trying to sell this back to you as philanthropy. Yes, because they steal a dollar in the dark and give back a penny in the spotlight, you are supposed to believe these billionaires are philanthropists. See below.

But back to the minimum wage. In 1981 it was raised to $3.35/hr, and it was still at that level in 1984. So, it has risen about 2.3 times in 40 years. But it hasn't risen since 2009. That's right, no increase in 11 years! Just based on inflation (4X), it should now be $13.40/hr. Which means if you transported someone making $7.25/hr back to 1981, he would be making just $1.81/hr. For every dollar I was making in college, he is now making 54 cents.

Based on that math, some groups have been pushing for $15/hr. But even that is too low. See this 2012 article, which makes the very good argument that it should be about $25 an hour. That is because to be fair, it should be tied not to inflation, but to the GDP and the national prosperity as a whole. As the nation gets richer, everyone in it should get richer. So if we tie the minimum wage to per capita income, we get about $25/hr for 2020.

To be clear, that isn't the same as dividing total wealth by number of people, and then writing that as an hourly wage. If we did that the number would go way way up. The per capita income of the US is about $62,000/yr. But since only half those people are in the workforce (many are children, etc.), we double that, to get $124,000. With 2080 hours in workyear, that comes out to about $60/hr. If everyone were paid the same, that is what you might make.

Except that. . . much of the wealth of the wealthy is hidden. A large percentage of their wealth, including income, is off the books, squirreled away in vaults in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. It isn't reported and therefore cannot be tracked. It is stolen and successfully laundered, in other words. Skimmed from treasuries worldwide. If all that yearly profit were put back on the books, and divided equally, you could take home between $100 and $600 an hour, depending on which country you live in. That's just a guess, but I would say it is a good guess, since it is based on the assumption the wealthy are reporting a small fraction of their real income, and on the assumption the total wealth of the wealthy is a far greater fraction of the whole than you are told. If you live in a country like Norway, you could be pulling in about $1000/hr (or more) for doing nothing. In the US, more like $400, and a lot of people would have to keep working for that. In poorer countries with fewer rich people, that would drop. But if we based the division not on where people lived, but on where the resources were stolen from, the poor countries would rise back up. Think of all the resources stolen from Africa, just for a start.

Anyway, the point of that was that a minimum wage of $25/hr takes none of that into account and isn't "Communist" at all. It doesn't address the huge stratification of society and doesn't even come close to any sort of leveling. All a $25/hr minimum wage does is take us back to 1968 levels of fairness. Meaning, it takes us back to a 1968 level of predation of the rich upon the poor. If you had asked the rich in 1968 if they thought they were being treated unfairly, not one (in private) would have said yes. In fact, many of them probably thought they were milking the system for all it was worth. Most of them should have felt guilty, and some probably did. But since then, the poor have gotten five or ten times poorer, while the wealthy have gotten five to ten times wealthier. Can you do the math? That is a hundred fold increase in wealth disparity in just 50 years. That's not a trickle-down economy, it is a flood-up economy. The rich have been vacuuming up huge sums from everyone beneath them. And this during a time when you are supposed to believe fairness was increasing. You are told that you are living in a kinder, gentler nation, one with more compassion to minorities and the dispossessed. Do you still believe it?

If you do, you may wish to read the current article at the New Yorker, which whitewashes the subject but does manage to drop some important data, though not conspicuously. Notice for instance that it is admitted (parenthetically and almost invisibly) that over 1 million Americans now make over $1 million a year, and that this number has climbed steeply in the past 20 years. These one million people qualify to apply as "Patriotic Millionaires", requesting an increase in their taxes, but only a couple of hundred have done so. They don't do the math for you, so I will. That means that at most .0002 of the rich have a problem with the current state of affairs. Only two in ten thousand give a damn. The other 9,998 see or read about poor people dying in the street or committing suicide or becoming drug addicts to ease their pain and couldn't care less. And those two in 10,000 who become Patriotic Millionaires, what do they do? They have committee meetings once a year and give talks to Congress, asking for something they know isn't going to happen. It is sort of like Noam Chomsky taking the side of the Palestinians: meaningless, since his support doesn't do them any good. These millionaires supposedly asking for their taxes to be raised could be actually doing something, but notice we are not told they are. Many of them are actually billionaires, not millionaires, so they could be giving real money to men's shelters, food kitchens, housing projects, and other poor relief. They could be paying their own workers more. They could be bringing jobs back from China and India and Mexico. Are they? We have no indication of it.

The "philanthropic" ones like Bill Gates are supposedly giving billions, but if we check what the Gates Foundation underwrites, it is mainly genetically modified crops in the 3rd world (like the "golden rice" conjob and other "intellicrops"), as well as 3rd world drug pushing (disguised as disease and population control). One of the largest beneficiaries of the Gates Foundation is GAVI, or the Vaccine Alliance, which pushes vaccines in poor countries. You would think that with all the money spent by the Foundation on this, they would just be buying the vaccines outright and donating them, but that isn't how it is done. Rather, according to the pages at Wikipedia, the money is used to “promote” the vaccine industry in these countries. I take that to mean the money goes to PR, marketing, advertising, and other bureaucracy, while the companies still make a huge profit. These are joint public/private initiatives, which means treasuries are also looted by the rich at the same time. And since there are no laws against Gates investing in fields he is also promoting through foundations (or if there are, they aren't enforced), I assume he is making far more money in these fields than he is "donating". In the US we see a similar con, where the Foundation is used "to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology". In other words, it is more promotion of products he is invested in, and zero real help for the poor. Do you think putting computers in libraries has helped poor people? No, it simply made library staff and everyone else dependent on computers for every action, leading to higher profits. That isn't philanthropy, it is cleverly disguised marketing. And it proves what I just said about laws against this sort of obvious self-promotion posing as philanthropy being non- existent or non-enforced. Any idiot can see what Gates is doing here, so do you really think government regulators can't figure it out? Do you think they don't know Gates is just calling marketing philanthropy and getting a tax write-off for it? No. Of course they know, or they would if there were any such regulators. But there aren't. The government stopped regulating big business decades ago, supposing it ever regulated it to start with. Who do you think regulates the Gates Foundation? What is the oversight body? There isn't one. Gates does whatever he wants, calls it whatever he wants, and hires people to write the Wiki page. And not one person in government or authority ever questions it.

Please go to Updates to read the entire essay.
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