ILLINOIS—With Illinois being the fourth-highest minimum wage state in America, Governor Pat Quinn is now saying he wants to raise it again—to $10 an hour.
And while that might make entry-level workers jump up and down with glee, the gloomy reality doesn’t seem to be cutting through to those who are prospective $10-an-hour workers.
Minimum wage isn’t, and was never meant to be, a “livable wage,” unlike what liberal/mass media minds want people to think. The only “livable wage” jobs out there are the ones a person sticks to, perseveres at, succeeds in a field and has longevity with. That’s known as “making a living,” by working hard and making yourself indispensable, either to your boss if you work for someone else, or to your customers if you work for yourself. A minimum wage is for someone who is starting off with a company, hasn’t proven himself yet, oftentimes is on a trial basis for both himself and the boss. The wage increases to a “living” or “livable” wage as the tenure with a company increases. Such a thing motivates a person to stay with a job…not hop around like a bee on every flower in the field, leaving one for the next because they “didn’t like it” or some such similar reason.
That said, what’s behind this latest push?
Let’s think about this for a minute.
Of course Pat Quinn wants reelected next year. In order to do that, he has to have the support of the least-informed. And, sad to say, people who are least informed about minimum wage are the least informed about the candidates. All they see is Quinn “fighting for the little people,” and they subsequently remember that when it’s time to fill out that ballot.
But the little people are the ones who are going to suffer most. Because the medium people are the ones who provide the jobs to the little people; not the big people. The big people rely on slave labor; that’s why they’re big. Unless, of course, they’re government “big” people. Then they rely on…you guessed it…the little people. Because the little people get tax dollars sucked out of them, too, even if it’s only in the form of sales tax or, worse, inflation tax: That little-talked-about “hidden” tax that permeates our lives when things begin costing more because the government prints more money.
Not to say things already aren’t too expensive. I mean, really…are you now not paying $1.00 an issue for your “daily” newspaper, the one that doesn’t have enough NEWS in it in one week to even tell you what’s going on? You are. If you choose to buy it. That’s $24 a month, folks, if it’s like a regular “daily” and only publishes 6 days a week. (You really are getting a bargain with ours, you know. Although if minimum wage goes up again, you can count on paying more. It can’t be helped. We have a staff now. We’re job-providers.)
$5 for a small fries might clear up the answer of “you want fries with that?” No. No, I don’t want fries with that. I want the minimum wage to stop increasing, and people to stop living outside of their means. Is that too much to ask?
See, when minimum wage goes up, those who provide jobs to the little people have to either make cuts somewhere, or bump up costs on their wares or services. That money doesn’t “materialize from somewhere” in a business’s bank account just because the state of Illinois demands it…it has to be re-allocated. Usually, medium-sized businesses will cut: staff, benefits, hours, something. Or, they’ll increase the cost of a product in order to bring more money in so they can pay the higher wage that the state forces them to pay. Either way, everybody—EVERYBODY—suffers.
Except the government. They don’t suffer, because one way or another, they’re going to get their cut. Because a bigger minimum wage means more taxes taken out of a paycheck. That’s by force, too. Try not paying your taxes and see what happens. And if the government doesn’t collect more taxes because fewer people are working, well, they just run a deficit budget. You and I can’t do that…but our state can. And does.
So sure, McDonald’s can start paying $10 an hour to an entry-level employee. If you like paying $26 for a movie ticket, or $8 for a single hamburger, or $5 for a tiny bag of chips at the convenience store…yeah, we need to raise minimum wage. But if you don’t, this needs to be stopped…because things are so expensive right now in Illinois in large part because we’re paying $8.25 an hour for an entry-level employee.
And it doesn’t stop there. If you have someone who’s worked for you a few years and is making $9.75 an hour, having earned his raises steadily, what’s going to happen when now, entry-level people are being paid a quarter an hour more than dude who’s been sticking it out for five years? HE’S going to want a raise, too…or he’ll leave, and go somewhere where the pay is better, even though he’ll have to start all over. But a business has to “start all over” too, with people who don’t know the job, providing inferior service for a time, and this creates a general disruption in things.
And of course, if you have minimum wage employees making $20,800 a year…all your government employees still eking it out on $40,000 are going to want an increase.
So do you see the landslide of expense this creates?
So many people do not. So many people merely think it’s a “right” to have a job, and be paid a “living wage.” It is NOT a “right” to have a job. It is a privilege. The only job-related “right” you have is to seek one. Period. And too many people are abusing that right by not taking advantage of it at all.
And increasing minimum wage isn’t going to help that. More money isn’t an incentive when it’s easier to sit on a couch all day, watch TV in government-supported (taxpayer-paid) housing, eating taxpayer-supplied food, talking on an Obama phone, and using Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) to buy cigarettes or bail yourself out of jail. Tatts and piercings are probably next on the list of the things we the taxpayers will be providing to those who want to live off us…and believe it, they’re living off us.
But there are those who are going to think minimum wage needs to go up, and are going to demand it. And are going to vote in the candidate who provides it, unfortunately, unless the word can get out, and the reality realized, that a $10 minimum wage is insane. So do what you can to educate yourself…because things are bad, and are getting worse, and this is yet another sign that Quinn wants two kinds of people in Illinois—those in government, and those living off it—and the rest of us can just go to hell.