Minimum Wage

Today in the Salt Lake Tribune:
Rise in minimum wage OK’d by House–Utah representatives are divided along party lines; Senate plans tax breaks for businesses

According to this article, the U.S. House voted to raise the minimum wage to a meager $7.25/hour (remember, this is not a living wage and is actually what I consider a slave wage). But (scratching my head), Utah’s republican delegation voted against this. Rep. Bishop’s excuse is that by raising minimum wage, businesses won’t be able to hire workers and that will lead to more homelessness, blah, blah, blah.

Bull. That’s a front for big greedy businesses and corporations that want to hire people for poverty level wages so they can make more profit. I mean, after all, if they are required to all of a sudden increase wages, their profit margins will decrease.

If that were to happen, the big business owner might have to get rid of one of his SUV’s and perhaps his summer resort home. Oh the agony!

What about putting profit back into the business instead of reaping a huge amount of profit?

How about writing legislation like this:

If a business grosses up to $1 million it could reap up to 25% profit on its gross revenues, with a scale looking like this:
Between $1-$10 million, 20% profit
Between $10-$15 million, 15% profit
and up to where once a company got to $100 million, the profit could be at 5% – that’s still a lot of money.

The more the business grosses, the less the profit.

There are loopholes, like, for example, a corporation could open up 100 businesses to make the huge profits, but legislation could be written to outlaw that.

Federal maximum wage laws should also be put into effect so that corporate CEO’s can’t be getting 50-60 times more than the average worker. That’s criminal and there should be a law against that.

The current bill to raise the wages is still not good enough. The proposed legislation calls for this increase to be phased in over two years. It’s been ten years since the last increase (which went to $5.15/hour and has remained there). Even at the current proposed wage, the average worker still needs to have two jobs to survive. With inflation, soon it will be three jobs.

The entire wage system needs to be revamped nationwide so that the average worker can make a comfortable living with one job and the corporate hogs don’t continue to exploit the workers so they can have most of the wealth.