Some people, mainly old coots, think there’s nothing more entertaining than listening to other old coots complaining about how tough things were in their younger days, and how easy today’s spoiled brats have it.
Whatever “it” is.
If you think about it (not that “it,” another “it”), there are actually many more pleasant ways to waste time than enduring the caterwauling of coots, including passing a kidney stone, presidential debates and recent Adam Sandler movies. Nevertheless, the cootly contingent has convinced itself – having grown up racist, sexist, homophobic, denouncing Darwin and enjoying the blandest popular music ever produced – that it’s qualified to advise everyone else on the optimal way to live their lives.
Take, for instance, the minimum wage.
“When I got my first job,” a typical coot will announce unprompted, “there wasn’t any of this communist minimum wage. I worked a 25-hour day, and I got paid a bucket of dirt. I took that bucket home and grew my own food in it. And I was damn grateful to have that, let me tell you.”
Actually, the coot kinda has a point. Which, in standard cootish fashion, I’ll get around to eventually.
Maine’s current minimum wage is $7.50 per hour or almost enough to buy a fancy craft beer in a trendy bar. So, if you have a full-time job at the minimum, you can slug down at least six of those beers each day (seven if you don’t tip). But if you have taxes and Social Security deducted from your paycheck, it’s more like four beers. If your employer doesn’t cover health insurance, that expense is going to cut you off somewhere south of two beers. And if you’re not living in your parents’ basement, rent, utilities and food are going to leave you searching under the couch cushions for enough loose change to share a suitcase of Coot Light with several friends.
Obviously, the minimum wage needs to be raised, and the Maine People’s Alliance has collected the required signatures to put a referendum on the November ballot to do just that. It would boost the base wage to nine bucks in 2017, followed by annual increases until it hits $12 in 2020. After that, it would rise each year based on inflation.
This would greatly benefit workers in dead-end jobs – unless the price of a quality pint somehow keeps pace.
A coalition of business groups (a polite way of saying a bunch of greedheads studying for the coothood) has been trying to convince the Legislature to place an alternative proposal on the ballot that would limit the increase to 50 cents yearly until the minimum hits $10 in 2020, where it would remain until the state’s entire population of coots has expired. Proponents of this less generous increase argue it would protect small companies from the burden of paying their employees a subsistence wage, but their real goal is far more devious.
State law requires that when legislators put a competing proposal out to referendum alongside a question initiated by popular petition, the ballot must also include an option allowing voters to choose “none of the above.” Rather than pushing the 10-buck-an-hour plan they’ve put forward, the proto-coots plan to quietly campaign for no change at all.
It’s doubtful the Legislature will accommodate this plot, and (if polls are to be believed) equally unlikely non-cootified voters will be conned into buying it. The passage of the 12-buck minimum looks like a safer bet than finding coots at an early bird special.
Which brings us back to that cooterized solution hinted at above, namely:
Abolish the minimum wage.
Think what that would mean for modern Maine.
In places like Portland, where there’s a worker shortage, it would have almost no effect.
In rural Maine, reducing paychecks would exacerbate the exodus of people to places where the money is better, thereby making more cheap land available for Roxanne Quimby’s proposed national park.
And in struggling mill towns, labor unions would see their ranks swelled by workers unwilling to submit to pay cuts.
In other words, getting rid of the minimum wage could be the best thing that ever happened for liberals.
Maybe I’ve misjudged those coots.
[[tagline]] I don’t even get paid minimum wage for reading emails sent to aldiamon@herniahill.net.
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