NEW living wage??

[Rob Tucker]

Terracore, I thing you are assuming too much. It is not a good habit to attribute motives to people that they do not themselves. It's like accusing someone who is against war of being sympathetic to Hitler or Pol Pot. Why stretch it so far?

The life fact of minimum wage as practiced here has not kept up with the realities of worker abuse by (mostly) corporate entities. We used to be a country of long term goals and planning. Those days have been replaced with short term thinking and has resulted, in my opinion, with millions unemployed or under employed. Minimum wage law has not kept up with that reality or with the fact the what once was a "starter" position in life has devolved to being the only source of income for too many hard working families.

I do also take issue with the statement that if you work hard you will get ahead. While that once may have been a reasonable statement - to a substantial degree those days are gone. It took me some time to realize this is a capitalistic society (not a laboristic one) where capital is richly rewarded in ways that honest labor is not. I am not against rewarding producers. I am against overly rewarding people that do nothing but manipulate other people's money - often our money.

Then we have the fact here in Hawaii where our educational and political institutions are largely failing us. Hawaii is politically imbalanced and being basically a one party state for sixty years has served some very well but has also marginalized too many average citizens.

I support a living wage.