Tuesday, March 25, 2014

PAUL RYAN CAUGHT LYING AND DISTORTING THE FACTS, AGAIN ... THIS TIME IT'S ABOUT MINIMUM WAGE

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) has lied and misled America so many times that I've had a field day posting on his claims (which you can see here). The fact that he helped put together and signed off on a budget with no numbers suggests that he's a borderline psychopath who lives in a make-believe world that only people like him recognize. Ryan's most recent claims on minimum wage tell us that he's not slowing down.



Here are the numbers from the Economic Policy Institute that help explain who earns minimum wage, and why it needs to be raised ...

  • The average age of affected workers is 35 years old;
  • 88 percent of all affected workers are at least 20 years old;
  • 35.5 percent are at least 40 years old;
  • 56 percent are women;
  • 28 percent have children;
  • 55 percent work full-time (35 hours per week or more);
  • 44 percent have at least some college experience.

The Pew Research Center has a nice graph that outlines minimum wage levels from 1938 through 2012. The yellow line lets you know how much a minimum wage salary could buy by year. So, yeah, in 1968 when the minimum wage was $1.60 you could buy at least four times what you could purchase in 2012.



In fact, if increases in mimimum wage had kept pace with worker productivity it would be about $21.72 an hour.

- Mark 

No comments:

Post a Comment