Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland two
other Democrats, Rep. Tim Ryan (Ohio) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky
(Ill.), staged a publicity stunt last week that really didn’t prove
much except that they don’t know jack about budgeting. Strickland,
who is president of the pro-minimum-wage-hike Center for American
Progress Action Fund, and the others “tried” to live on the minimum
wage for a week. All they proved was that they either don’t know
how to budget, or they think their constituents are dumb enough to
believe their conceit.
Amid a bunch of stiff indignation and self-congratulation, the
ex-governor
detailed in Politico his crazy difficulties like
having to take off his jacket and walk over a mile in 90-degree
heat because he couldn’t afford a cab to his office. What he and
the other #LiveTheWage challengers really hit on, though, was
food.
“I truthfully rarely think about how much it costs,”
said Schakowsky, who
invited cameras into his home to document the horrors of eating
tuna sandwiches.
Apparently Ryan doesn’t either, because he “spent about seven
bucks … on a couple cans of sardines and a bag of crackers from the
convenience store up the street.” Then, just before quitting the
challenge early, he used his “last couple of dollars to buy trail
mix.”
Similarly, Strickland, who blasted other pols as living in “a
bubble,” blew his money on meals from McDonald’s and other highly
processed and expensive foods like bologna.
He failed his challenge and concluded that “raising the minimum
wage to $10.10 will increase the average annual salary of a minimum
wage worker to $19,777, hardly a living wage, but a major step
forward for the 30 million hardworking Americans who live in
poverty while earning the minimum wage.” Not according to the
Congressional Budget Office, which
says that it would push a much more modest 900,000 people above
the poverty line, at the cost of about 500,000 jobs.
It’s been
so well established that home-cooked meals are more nutritious
and less expensive than processed junk food, it’s absurd that
Strickland and company have to be debunked
yet again. Watchdog‘s Maggie Thurber today published
a far less dramatic chronicle of planning, couponing, and budgeting
so she’d have some cash left over after purchasing plenty of
healthy food as well as gasoline to drive to work. Even the
left-sympathetic Cleveland Plain Dealer
pointed out how unrealistic the politicians’ spending habits
were.
Thurber points out some important facts, too:
Only 1.7
percent of Ohioans are single parents earning minimum wage,
while less than 5 percent nationally are heads of households
earning minimum wage. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics, only 4.3 percent of
those in the workforce earn at or below the federal minimum
wage.And those individuals are eligible for several other
government benefits like SNAP, Aid to Dependent Children, Temporary
Assistance to Needy Families, utility vouchers and transportation
vouchers. They’re not really getting by on just $77 a week.
Nobody wants people to be stuck in poverty, living off junk
food. A lack of good-quality food in urban areas is a serious
problem, but these politicians aren’t part of the solution. Rather
than promoting policy changes that would
reduce regulatory barriers to work, they want to hike the
minimum wage, which is effective at
increasing unemployment pricing young people and low-skilled
workers
out of jobs and guaranteeing that small, local businesses
cannot compete with bigger companies.
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