It's the least we can do

I found an interesting discussion on social media this past weekend. After a segment on the All in with Chris Hayes show discussing the fast food worker protests over increasing the minimum wage, the response came swiftly. Many questioned the sanity of a worker who had been working at an establishment for 15 years at near minimum wage. Others questioned the ambition of the worker or ability to improve themselves. Still others offered tales of how they scraped by and worker their way to a better life, offering no sympathy for those that cannot today. Many people defended those who cannot break the cycle of low-income employment, citing lack of ability to schedule interviews or even attend school with the schedule their employers require.

At the core of these arguments comes the idea of opportunity. If one wants to "get ahead" a college education is the best opportunity to make that happen. The question then becomes, can a person get ahead on a minimum wage job?

The answer is, without significant help.....no.

To see how drastically things have changed since many people were able to work their way through school in the 60s and 70s, I offer this comparison. (Full disclosure, the calculations and research are all mine, but the idea came from an article I read about a month ago that I can no longer find. My apologies to that author for not citing their work.)

In 1970, the federal minimum wage was $1.45 an hour. (I am fairly certain my dad made that pumping gas in his second job that he would work after teaching all day.) A single person, with no other family obligations, working 50 hours a week during the summer and 20 hours a week during the school year could make - after deductions - about $1,818 per year at that wage. At the time, the average four-year, state school tuition+room+board rate was $1,287. That means the student could attend college, live on campus, and have about $500 left over to figure out where to live and eat during the summer. Given the reports of my older relatives living on Chef-Boy-Ardee, it seems likely that someone could survive on that and get that college education.

Today, the federal minimum wage sits at $7.25 an hour. A single person, with no other family obligations, working that same balance of hours as their 1970s counterpart, would clear around $9,090 over the course of the year. Today's average tuition+room+board for a four-year, state university sits somewhere between $15,000 and $19,000. At a time when the difference in incomes between going to college and not going to college mean more than ever, when union membership - the sure ticket to the middle class for the blue-collar worker - continues to drop, the minimum wage worker has the almost impossible task of working to get themselves by. Telling them to work 80 hours a week in the summer and 50 hours a week in the school year will still not get them close to their 1970s counterpart, and will jeopardize their ability to successfully complete their degree. A comparable minimum wage in this "work hard to improve yourself" example would be around $17.75 per hour to give today's ambitious worker the same chance they would have had a generation ago.

It all comes down to equality of opportunity. There are some who could live at home and forego the expense of living on campus, but they must have someone who would support them. On the other side, there are some who have families to support while making this Herculean effort. They can only dream that they will be able to make that happen. No matter what the racial, class, or social background...no matter what support system a person has...the keys to a better future must be equally available. If we want to provide the same opportunity to this generation as we did a generation ago, if we want people today to achieve the same or better quality of life than the previous generation, we must look at the social equity that our systems create. When there is none, as exemplified by the current minimum wage, we must rectify that.

It is absolutely the least we can do.

When it comes to sustainable energy, America really IS the land of opportunity

There is a sad fact that we have to face....the US is a very wasteful country. Our politicians like to talk about all the waste in our federal government, but truth be told, that pales in comparison to the amount of food, energy, water, material that we waste on a day-in and day-out basis. This attitude of waste grows logically out of two different characteristics of our early country: First, the amount of available space that existed in North America during the 17th through 19th centuries, and second, the fact that our country developed all of its lasting infrastructure after the Industrial Revolution and during an era of nearly-free energy resources. Efficiency was not an issue...progress, prosperity, and profit ruled the day.

Now that we are dealing with the repercussions of that, one might think that we have to completely change our infrastructure to move to a more sustainable future...

But they would be wrong.

Precisely because we have been so wasteful, we have an extraordinary opportunity to make improvements...potentially even more so than even Europe (where infrastructure naturally supports sustainable action more effectively) or China and India (where they are starting with mostly a clean slate and do not have the burden of sunk investment. In order to move to a more sustainable economy, but without the financial shock that comes from contraction, we need to make three major shifts:

1.  Eliminate fossil fuels from our mix of electricity generation.
2.  Shift fossil-fuel burning as a source of heating energy from our buildings.
3.  Reduce vehicle milage per unit of GDP and shift remaining to cleanly generated electricity.

If we were starting from scratch, we would need to develop a large grid infrastructure to handle the new loads shifting from fossil resources for buildings and vehicles. Because we are so wasteful, we can build this capacity much more cost effectively through efficiency in our existing buildings and systems. Meanwhile, as we close coal, nuclear, and natural gas electricity-generating plants (in that order) and add new renewables, we can, again, use efficiency to reduce the pain associated with dropping new generation.

This also opens up great opportunities for innovation. New technologies and design strategies make it so that as we renovate or replace buildings in existing, developed cities, we can introduce distributed generation assets that are easier to install. With advances in communication, grid operators can have an even better handle on these distributed resources than they traditionally had on large utility-scale generation. We are learning that the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy resources can happen more swiftly and with less disruption than previously thought.

Many environmentalists treat our culture of inefficiency as a pox that we should try to wipe out by degrading all of us for years of efficiency sins. Instead of that negative view, we should focus on the opportunity...we can make great strides, very quickly, and with no disruption to quality of life. In fact, if we do it well, we can increase quality of life dramatically...across the whole spectrum of Americans...while we grow more and more efficient. Americans have shown, as Churchill said, that we will do the right thing once all other options are exhausted.

We are just starting to do the right thing...and we will all be the better for it.

www.folkartfromtheharbor.com