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Regardless of which side of the line you fall on, if you are an American and you pay taxes, this is YOUR money ....

http://michellemalkin.com/archives/007156.htm
 (http://michellemalkin.com/archives/007156.htm)
The $104 billion emergency spending bill for Iraqi has nearly $25 billion in pork and special interest. Here are a few ...

I've got comments on each one of these, but alas I have to go get some work done so I can pay taxes to support all of these pet projects.

$25 million for payments to spinach producers

$120 million to the shrimp industry

$74 million for peanut storage

$5 million for shellfish, oyster and clam producers

$1.5 billion to the Army Corps of Engineers for recovery along the coast, including funding for Hawaii for an April 2006 flood;

$850 million for Department of Homeland Security grants ($625M for rail/transit grants, $190M for port security grants, and $35M for urban area security grants);

$660 million for the procurement of an explosives detection system for the Transportation Security Administration;

$640 million for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program;

$425 million for education grants for rural areas;

$388.9 million for a backlog of Department of Transportation projects;

$165.9 million (including $60.4 million for salmon fisheries in the Klamath Basin region) for fisheries disaster relief;

$75 million for salaries and expenses for the Farm Service Agency;

$48 million in disaster construction money for NASA;

$25 million for grants through the Safe and Drug Free Schools program;

$25 million for asbestos abatement at the Capitol Power Plant;

$24 million to sugar beet producers;

$22.8 million for geothermal research and development;

$20 million for reimbursements to Nevada for “insect damage;”

$12 million for Forest Service money requested by the president in the non-emergency FY2008 budget

$3.5 million for guided tours of the Capitol;

$283 million for the Milk Income Loss Contract program;

$120 million to compensate for the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the shrimp and menhaden fishing industries;

$100 million for citrus assistance;

$60.4 million for salmon fisheries in the Klamath River region in California and Oregon;

$50 million for asbestos mitigation at the U.S. Capitol Plant;

$25 million for livestock;

$20 million for Emergency Conservation Program for farmland damaged by freezing temperatures;

$16 million for security upgrades to House of Representatives office buildings;

$10 million for the International Boundary and Water Commission for the Rio Grande Flood Control System Rehabilitation project;

$6.4 million for House of Representative’s Salaries and Expenses Account for business continuity and disaster recovery expenses;

$5 million for losses suffered by aquaculture businesses including breeding, rearing, or transporting live fish as a result of viral hemorrhagic septicemia;

$4 million for the Office of Women’s Health at the Food and Drug Administration; and

$3 million for sugar cane;

A minimum wage increase, which is the subject of separate legislation and

Allows the transfer of funds from holiday ornament sales in the Senate gift shop.

And there are more, many, many more.


DOES YOUR HEAD HURT YET? I KNOW MY POCKET DOES!!!

Can you say term limits and line item veto?

One thing, though. The Federal Government wouldn't have to raise the minimum wage if corporations actually paid people enough to live on in the first place. Since big business doesn't want to do that, though, it should be compelled to.

OK let me be unpopular ...

Raise the minimum wage, raise the cost to make the product, raise the cost to make the product, raise the cost to sale the product, raise the cost to sale the product, your back to square one ... rinse and repeat.

Also widely known as inflation.

There's also the problem that when the minimum wage is raised, those already making ABOVE minimum wage don't usually get a raise.  Since people making more money spend more money, the hit from that inflation is a double whammy: not only do you inflate prices (and devalue the dollar in global markets), but you also decrease the spending power of those that actually have sufficient money to spend it on non-essentials.

By the way, minimum wage jobs are NOT designed to provide a livable wage.  The people doing minimum wage jobs for the most part are teenagers working for goof-off money.  So, can we drop the pretense that raising the minimum wage is going to help people that cannot afford to live be able to afford to live?  The sob story plays good in campaign speeches, but like most of the hot-air coming out of the mouths of politicians, it bears little resemblance to reality.

Certainly I've learned that it is not good, in general, to raise the minimum wage (which the government, by all rights, shouldn't have to be involved in) but I don't buy the argument that if there was no minimum wage that the "competition" from good paying jobs is going to ever amount to anything (that is, to say, that without a minimum wage, what kind of standards will out-of-touch companies have when paying low-level employees?
As a 25-year-old working for $8.45 hourly as a manager in a local store after having been there four and a half years already, I'd say that it would be impossible for me to afford housing, my car payment, insurance, and college tuition without living under my mom's roof. What should make me think my place of employment would pay me more than that if the minimum wage was abolished?

And no. This is not a heated debate. Just a legitimate question I have. I'm chiefly Libertarian in my outlook, but this is one of my points of contention.

$8.45 per hour is significantly more than I made in grad school for 5 years, and I lived on it.  Granted, that was a few years ago, but is offered as food for thought.

The problem with your question is that the minimum wage is designed neither for management jobs nor for folks staying with a position for 4-1/2 years.  The minimum wage is for ENTRY LEVEL jobs.  As I said earlier, it mostly applies to teenagers.  If the minimum wage were raised, IT WOULD NOT EFFECT YOU - you are already above the minimum wage.

In fact, as I said before, raising it would hurt you because the spending power of your $8.45 per hour is lowered due to inflation.  If what you are talking about is raising the wage to a point that managers are making minimum wage, then you have managers and entry level workers at the same wage, another form of 'leveling' that is usually associated with communism.  There are many long term social problems that go with that, as was seen in the Soviet Union during the 80's.

There is a correlation between raising the minimum wage and increasing unemployment.  So, while it sounds good to raise the wage, it hurts potential employees.  Labor costs are generally the SINGLE biggest expense of most businesses, so if the cost of labor goes up, the number of employees the business can afford goes down.  It boils down to a supply and demand problem, just like any other market.  If the price gets too high, the "customer" (in this case, the employer) won't pay, ESPECIALLY for unskilled, entry level labor.

Away from the theoretical for a moment, I don't have an answer for your particular situation.  Perhaps you could use the experience you have gained at that employer to seek employment elsewhere.  Perhaps you could ask for a raise.  I don't know your situation or lifestyle, but perhaps you could make adjustments to live on $8.45 per hour.  It CAN be done, though admittedly in some discomfort.  For the contiguous 48 states and DC, the 2004 HHS poverty line was $9,800 for a family of one, and $8.45 per hour for 40 hours per week is quite a bit above that.

The answer seems simple to me, if you have a job that is not paying you a "living wage" ... find a better job.

 I never understand people that stay at jobs that don't pay well and expect the world to change around them and they not change there world. Some times you have to make sacrifices to get places where what I find is most people don't want to make sacrifices what they want to do is make excuses. It might seem mean and cruel of me but I longer feel sorry or empathy for someone that is "not making it" because all to often it is the choices they made that led them to the world they live in, and I see NO REASON why I should pay for some one poor choices. (I'm speaking in general)