(This cartoon image is by Rob Rogers in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)Ever since they crashed the American economy and sent it into recession (while destroying or shipping overseas millions of jobs), the Republicans have been whining about the increasing enrollment in the SNAP program (food stamps) and its rising cost. Seemingly oblivious to their own responsibility for the growing need, the Republicans have only one solution for it -- cut the money for the program, thus taking food out of the mouths of the hungry. But they aren't even serious about saving this money, because they turned right around and gave it to rich agribusiness interests.
While the Republicans weren't able to get the huge cuts they wanted (more than $20 million), they were able to con the Democrats into agreeing to about $4 billion in cuts for the SNAP program. The sad part of all this is that there was a way to save even more in SNAP spending -- and do it without taking food away from the hungry. It turns out that simply raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would save $4.6 billion in food stamp spending -- and indexing it to inflation would extend those savings for years ($46 billion in the next 10 years).
And it gets even better, because the SNAP program is not the only government program that would save substantially by raising the minimum wage. The government would also save big money through a reduction in the amounts spent on Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
The Republicans will be quick to tell you that businesses couldn't afford to pay more than the current minimum wage, and that forcing them to do so will cause them to lay off workers or go out of business. Nonsense. Study after study has shown that there is no significant job loss after a rise in the minimum wage -- and any business that cannot pay its employees a livable wage is probably destined to fail anyway.
The truth is that far too many businesses are passing their own labor costs on to the American taxpayers -- by paying such a small wage that those employees must seek help through government programs (like food stamps, Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit). It is time for businesses (many of them giant corporations like Wal-Mart) to pull their own weight and pay their own labor costs.
Any business that hires a full-time employee should assume the responsibility for paying that worker a livable salary. It is just wrong for that employer to expect the American taxpayers to pay for any part of those labor costs. The minimum wage needs to be raised immediately to $10.10 an hour (which would only be about $21,000 a year, or less than half of the U.S. median wage), and it should be indexed to the inflation rate (so it won't immediately start to shrink again).
