2/25/21 Thank God, Romney, and Tom Cotton for Your Blessings

Hang in there, wage earners! There's hope yet that you can move up from your family's current rented mobile home into another one that doesn't leak. Yes, you. Instead of earning $7.25 an hour in your thankless job -- and having your employer snip off a little time on both ends on occasion -- you can look forward, four years from now, to earning $10 an hour!

That is the generous minimum wage that Senators Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Tom Cotton (R-AR) have proposed. They are, of course, responding to the $15 an hour minimum that Democrats are calling for, but filibustering and stonewalling have thwarted those lefties before. Earning $10 an hour four years from now is probably as much as they could negotiate anyway! Besides, you know, so many states already have minimums above $10 an hour, you can see that the marketplace will get to your raise eventually.

Inflation has been minimal -- lucky you. Nowadays, the doodad you bought for 82 cents in 2009, when the minimum wage was last raised, now costs you $1. That doesn't really capture it, of course, since living costs have risen 20 percent. You know how economists throw numbers around. You should be grateful to the Federal Reserve that you don't have to go to a food bank every week, the way military families do.

Mind you, at $10 an hour, you'll still have to work at least two jobs. Your employers aren't about to give you enough hours to trigger the federal requirement that they offer benefits -- you know, sick leave and health insurance and that helpful stuff. Thank goodness Medicaid steps in to save your boss the cost of your health insurance! Otherwise, you'd be completely on your own.

You're fortunate to have such public-spirited wealthy people. After all, they own half the country's financial resources, but you have to assume they have your best interests at heart. Look at Bill Gates, for instance. He's generously offering his thoughts to the public; never mind that he invented...No, wait, he didn't invent anything. Never mind that Gates went big on the gig economy when it was still, gosh darn it, just a twinkle in the industry's eye. Jumping on a shoestring strategy and following it through -- that's why he has the big bucks and you don't.

Indeed, bold ideas for worker protections, like Romney's and Cotton's, will be of great benefit to literature. Thanks to ideas like theirs, wage earners will continue to beat on against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the Dickensian past.

https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/540341-romney-cotton-a-cancun-cabbie-and-the-minimum-wage-debate?fbclid=IwAR19ZJ9djXgmciO4Ys94VBWZRmWLNLuTCguowGw73W4VB8udBn5h-EJlzaI