photo #1519914

Welcome to Fantasyland where fantasy tries to be fact. And this guy's fantasy fails miserably.Yes, some liberal moron has decided that rather than a $15 per hour minimum wage should really be $26 an hour. It seems this mental midget came up with a graph consisting of two lines. The first being the minimum wage and the other being worker productivity. Back in the very late 1960's productivity rose sharply while the minimum wage increased at a much slower rate… Well no kidding.The disparity, which he totally, no doubt intentionally, missed, lies in a ton of different reasons. None of which he bothered to address, mention, or for that matter, ever had a thought about . I'm more than happy, and capable, of explaining the changes.First and foremost is of course technological advances. Technology in the field of robotics and common low wage jobs (think order kiosks at fast food eateries, self serve gas stations, assembly plants, self-checkouts in stores, and internet communications) are an either/or proposition. Common sense dictates to the business owners or managers the profitable way to go. And there's not much to gain by going the more costly route to "save jobs" if it means all the employees will soon be looking for new jobsAnd the cost of technology continues to decline rather than increase. (They call that "progress" but being an old school kind of guy I still believe in the notion that more people working and less people on welfare is still the better alternative.) But this is a trend that will continue to escalate and leave the less educated in a hole created by our education system as it teaches political propaganda rather than useful tools to get and retain a job. And make no mistake, it is here to stay. When you've got computers writing operating systems instead of human programmers you know you've gone beyond the tipping point.Then of course we have declining manufacturing based jobs as robotics prove they can make every part with perfect precision, don't need healthcare, don't call in sick, never go on strike, nor do they take paid vacations. When was the last time you saw robotics go on strike and man(?) a picket line? As for all those components robots put together more and more those parts are being produced in places like China and India. The real irony is that those parts, jigs and fixtures they're making are being built with machinery and equipment bought at auction for ten cents on the dollar from American-owned companies that once made those parts here in the USA and were forced out of business when auto makers decided it was more profitable to "consolidate" their supplier base to multi-national companies in other countries. Turning around distressed companies and saving American's jobs was my work back then. Those M&E auctions brought tears to my eyes when I realized those very machines were going to provide jobs in China supplying the same automakers that American workers once supplied.But to be balanced, not all the blame can be shouldered by the automaker leadership. The Japanese, as too were the Europeans, coming into a far larger marketplace with their products. High quality products. Meanwhile, unions here couldn't read the handwriting scrawled all over the wall.While all this was well underway the education industry was keeping kids filled with the notion that only a college degree could help them get their bigger bite of the apple. Learning a trade came to be thought of by elitists to be manual labor. Of course we still need electricians, plumbers linemen, etc. And in just two or three years of training they are making far more than the uneducated Whopper-Floppers who make up the majority of this guy's $26 an hour pipe dream. As far as those who were "better educates" by universities ask them how they are doing now that their once decent paying job has been farmed out to some kid in India for far well less than they were making doing the exact same job.By now you can see where this went. Productivity, meaning fewer people producing more results, really took off. But it also meant that those with less education, ambition and common sense enough to be successful would be certain to lead to a growing base of people with no rosy future awaiting them.But this graph, this work of pure trash, as presented is taking two entirely unrelated data sets, driven by two very unrelated sets of circumstances, and then flat out lying that there exists a correlation between the two. Or much more simply put, this "research" has the same usefulness of mammary glands on a boar hog.In the final analysis a person is only worth what they can contribute to a business, or any organization for that matter. Paying anything more than that will cause consumers to look to other sources, generally foreign, since balancing the checkbook every month is a great reminder that reality is indeed real.In closing, this guy's $26 an hour fantasy reminded me of a few lines of Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes' classic "Journey To The Center Of The Mind" where Ted belts out;"But please realize you'll probably be surprisedFor it's the land unknown to manWhere fantasy is factSo if you can, please understandYou might not come back".Thanks for reading.