Finding a balancing point

One of my favorite playground apparatuses as a kid, was the teeter-totter. It is also known by the name, seesaw. My dictionary defines it as: "a plank balanced at the middle, in which two children alternately ride up and down." Our country's leaders at all levels of government are currently trying to teeter-totter a way to balance our lowest form of worker pay, known as the minimum wage.

On those playgrounds of old, the teeter-totters were actually real wooden planks. They could be dangerous in several ways. Sometimes kids would get splinters from the wood. They were even known to break if too many kids got on at one time. Those issues never worried us too much. You know what I mean -- the time before everything in our lives had to be totally safe.

One of our favorite games on those seesaws was to arrange or group a mixture in the numbers of kids on each side of the seesaw until we balanced the weight evenly. None of us possessed an understanding of physics, but we knew what balance on the teeter-totter entailed.

In the preamble of our Constitution, we find the phrase "to promote the general welfare." Opinions differ widely in the meaning of those words, but I think most Americans believe that our government should make laws that give everyone a fair chance at finding a job and being able to support themselves and their families.

Wouldn't it be in line with those words, if our leaders could establish an unbiased balance point for an affordable or livable minimum wage? If only a realistic minimum wage was as simple to determine as it was for me and my friends on those seesaws.

In 1914, Henry Ford shocked the business world and his fellow titans of industry when he more than doubled his assembly line worker's daily pay to the then unheard of wage of $5 per day.

Many of the other factory owners of that time cried foul on Ford. They told him he would ruin our capitalistic system with such a raise. His answer (paraphrased) to them was simple and direct: my assembly line workers need to earn enough in wages so they can afford to buy the very Model T's they are producing.

Therein lies the crux of the question that still exists today. How do we keep our economy going strong and at the same time insure that our products and services are produced at a competitive price, and still pay our workers enough to have a reasonable standard of living?

On the playground we learned that if one side was out of balance, the teeter-totter would just not function. The same is true in our economy. If we don't have balance, nothing functions well either.

The current minimum wage for workers in our community is set by the State of Missouri, at $7.50 per hour. I can remember when I was working just out of high school at a summer job, in a lumber yard here in Nevada at the hourly minimum wage of $1.25. At one point the next year, it rose to $1.40 per hour. So, I have personal experience and knowledge regarding our state minimum wage.

If you take today's current minimum wage ($7.50 per hour) for a 40-hour week, it corresponds to a gross pay of $300 (before taxes).

A couple working full-time would receive gross wages of $31,200.00 annually. Please remember, that minimum wage earners have no benefits, no vacation and no sick leave. Even if they work every available hour, here is a sample monthly budget for a family of four:

Rent: $500, utilities: $150; water: $40; car payments; $400; groceries: $500; gasoline: $100; cable: $20; phones: $60; clothing: $100; school lunches: $40; activities: $50; dining: $50; repairs: $25; and miscellaneous: $25. Subtotal: $2,060.

This is far from a complete list, and I purposely used what I felt were figures at the low end of the spectrum. Regardless, you can see that in today's world, it is impossible for most families to live anywhere close to what we would call "comfortable," on this budget. Remember that we are dealing with gross pay, based on full time employment, before taxes.

If the monthly gross family (minimum wage) income averages $2,400 before taxes, it is obvious that there is little left in the budget for other important items such as healthcare.

There is and old saying, "you can't have your cake and eat it too." Well, that is just what some of our leaders are trying to do. They want to keep wages as low as possible to promote competitive labor costs for our businesses. At the same time, they want families to be able to pay their own way for things like private healthcare costs. It simply will not compute.

Recently, the United States Senate failed to take up and bring to a vote a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $10 per hour. Is that a fair wage increase? I admit it seems to be a large one time increase, but if we don't begin to raise the base minimum wage, then how are these families to survive and prosper in our society?

Just like the balancing of the teeter-totter, our wage systems in this country have to somehow be balanced in a manner that benefits the "common good," as specified in the Constitution.

Wise, cooperative leaders must insure that we are able to produce our goods and services at cost levels that can compete with other countries. At the same time, we must make sure our citizen workers can prosper and be able to purchase those same goods and services in the way Henry Ford did. Ford believed that a worker must have the ability to earn a living wage. I suspect he was pretty good at balancing a teeter-totter!