Help Me Understand This

This article in Newsweek (via NewsBusters) caught my eye because it focuses on the Greater Cleveland area, where I happen to live. However, what I seem to get out of it is: "America is in trouble because we don't have enough socialist programs, the minimum wage is too low, and it's all the fault of the eeeevil George Bush." Otherwise, I don't really know what the point of this article is.

Let's start with the sub-title: "For the first time, poverty shifts to the U.S. suburbs." For the first time? Sorry, I don't buy that. To begin with, the two families discussed in the story are facing hard times because the wage earner(s) in the family are currently out of work. Yeah, I grew up in one of the nicest suburbs in Greater Cleveland, and we went through a lot of hard times when my father was out of work, too. In the end, my father ended up starting his own business because he couldn't find a job, and that left our family financially straitened for a time. To be honest, our family was never well-off. The only thing my family splurged on was a parochial school education for my two sisters and I. I'm not sure what the financial threshold was in the early 80's, but when I was attending high school, we even went through a time where I was eligible for free lunches at school, and we also received some food from the government.

Moving on to the first paragraph, we discover that our first token victim was making almost double what our Democratic saviors in Congress want to change the minimum wage to. So changing the minimum wage would help him how? Oh wait, his real problem is that he has no "safety net." No nearby food pantry, job retraining center or low-cost health clinic. Oh, how can those evil Republicans be so cruel? Okay, he was a 38-year-old fork-lift operator. Maybe he should have working on increasing his skills on his own before then? Or does that just make me cold-hearted? On top of the other problems, public transportation is "inadequate." I suppose we should just create a public transportation system that runs through every little nook and cranny of the suburbs, whether or not it is economically viable. We can just take the money out of taxes, after all. Then it won't matter whether the system makes money! After all, this poor man couldn't get a job in another suburb because the bus ride would be three hours each way. But he already has (or had) a car, and if he got a new job, couldn't he afford gas and car insurance again? Or at least after he'd been working for a while?

Then we move on to find out that for the first time, more Americans in poverty live in the suburbs than cities. This is a little different than the article's sub-title implies, and it only makes sense, at least in the Cleveland area. The city of Cleveland has long been built-up, while there has been lots of building in the suburbs. The house where I grew up, in which my mother still lives, has long since ceased to be "stylish" and the neighborhood does not house the same economic class as it did when I grew up. People have moved on to bigger, newer houses, further and further out. This can be seen as unfortunate, but unless we want to dictate to people where they can live, it will happen.

Next, we find out that the nation's manufacturing sector is "contracting," whatever that means. We don't get an explanation of why this is happening, however. Perhaps because our country has chased out much of its manufacturing, with high taxes and complicated laws?

Our next victim family ran into problems after only one month, when the mother was laid off of her job at a grocery store, and the father missed a month of work with a heart attack. From when my sister worked at a grocery store, I know grocery store workers usually make more than minimum wage rather quickly, so again raising the minimum wage would be moot here. And again, this is a family going through difficult times, for less than three months when this article was written. I would classify this very differently from "poverty." My husband could not find a job in his field for eight months during 2002, and things were very difficult for us financially. But we're doing our best now to recover and get ahead. And we live in the suburbs!

I can't even begin to comprehend this "living wage" versus "minimum wage" nonsense. As I pointed out already, none of the people above were likely to have been making minimum wage anyway. So were they making a "living wage"?

Every family will go through hard times when unemployment hits, and it will probably hit every family at some point. But this article offers no real hope at all, nothing but a sad picture of how hard life is without a socialist "safety net." Can we get a story next time about families who are making it?