Preaching Edjamacation
by digby
The latest in plutocratic blubbering:
Billionaire Wilbur Ross on Tuesday declared that “the 1 percent is being picked on for political reasons” and that poor people should stop their gripin’ and get themselves an education if they ever want to stop being part of the 99 percent.
“Education is the way that people get out of the ghetto and into, if not the 1 percent, something close to it,” Ross explained in an interview with Bloomberg TV.
In 1979, 57.5% of workers who earned the minimum wage completed high school. That number swelled to about 72% in 2008.
This growth in education levels for minimum wage workers suggests that the minimum wage is failing to keep pace with workers’ capacity to produce goods and services. Higher productivity — the capacity to produce more per hour worked — should allow these workers to earn higher wages. In fact, we see the opposite.
That’s quite a success story, particularly since the minimum wage today would be worth $21.72 an hour if it kept up with increases in worker productivity. Also too, young people having to sell themselves into indentured servitude for decades in order to pay for college. But that’s a feature, not a bug.
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