Can someone answer my question about the minimum-wage hike?

[hunter]

76. If you get accepted to a German College, it's free. You don't even have to be German.

BTW, Wal Mart failed miserably in Germany because Germans weren't buying that low-wage anti-union bullshit.

Small town America is poor BECAUSE wages are low and companies like Wal-Mart suck the money (and the life) right out of them, places so miserable that meth and heroin and unprotected sex start to seem like reasonable recreations to the people trapped there.

I've spent a lot of time in small towns. I don't generally have a high opinion of small business people, or small farmers, or small town politicians and landlords. Oh, I know, we're force-fed a lot of myths about opportunity and all that crap as children; that if we work hard we too can be a millionaires, but it's mostly bunk. Propaganda.

Good union jobs and socialist government policy would be beneficial, especially in impoverished rural U.S.A..

Low wages are never beneficial. The best jobs can't really be exported either -- teaching, medicine, building and improving housing and other infrastructure, child and elder care... you can't send that work overseas.

The U.S.A. is a land of grifters and their marks, mean selfish people and their victims, and it always has been. Moving from slavery to wage-slavery was a step up, but it's long past time for us to grow up and become a truly civilized nation, not some shit-hole of a perpetually "developing" nation that thinks it won the world because it was the first to have the BOMB and happened to be a bit beyond the technical grasp of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. (I suspect, had we been in the same geographical position of Russia, that the U.S.A. would've folded to the Nazis like France did. Hell, many U.S.A. citizens supported the Nazis at first, and some still do.)

I'm not inclined to leave the U.S.A. quite yet, I've still got some kind of hope and fondness for this place, and things are not as bad here as they were for my ancestors who fled Europe for Wild West U.S.A. in the mid-nineteenth century as pacifists and other sorts of religious heretics, but I don't see any reason to tolerate any of the stuff that makes any nation a shit-hole. Racism, religious intolerance, corruption, slavery and wage slavery, ignorance, illiteracy and innumeracy... the U.S.A. reeks of these things.

There's no polite way for me to say this, but in my not-so-humble opinion and based on your postings here, I believe you are one of the grifters, defending low wages because there is something in it for you.