Wanted: A High-Road Economy
Waving the banner of “global competitiveness,” corporate and government policymakers are running the U.S. economy into the ground. We are becoming a nation of Scrooge-Marts and outsourcers - with an increasingly low-wage workforce instead of a growing middle class.
We are living the American Dream in reverse.
The minimum wage buys less today than it did when Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton opened his first Walton’s 5 & 10 in Bentonville, Arkansas in 1951.
It would take more than $9 in 2006 to match the federal minimum wage peak reached in 1968, adjusting for inflation. At today’s $5.15 an hour, it takes nearly two minimum wage workers to earn what one made 38 years ago.
The minimum wage sets the wage floor. When the minimum wage is stuck in quicksand, it drags down wages for workers up the pay scale as well. Hourly wages for average workers are 11 percent lower than they were in 1973, despite rising worker productivity.
