Raising the minimum wage
Re: “Hike in minimum wage falls short in the Senate,” Aug. 4 news story.
Accountants estimate that parents having a newborn today will spend $250,000 to $300,000 on that child by the time it finishes four years of college. Having four children will cost them more than a million dollars.
Assuming Congress does eventually raise the minimum wage to $7/hour, it will still take both parents working 40 hours per week, for 30 years, to obtain this amount. This is provided they don’t eat, drink, they go naked, sleep on the street in a cardboard box, don’t drive, smoke and never get sick for three decades.
Unless these parents learn English and educate themselves to obtain a higher-paying job, their kids won’t graduate.
But wait, maybe the benevolent “Uncle Sam” will give their kids a “free ride” through school if they promise to vote for his re-election.
John P. Cardie, Westminster
. . .
While my heart bleeds (I am a liberal, after all) for the people seeking to make an honest, decent, livable minimum wage, I also wish that for myself. I am a fairly new teacher in Colorado. I came to teaching from the film industry where I made, as Angelina Jolie put it, stupid money. I could make in three days what I make in one month of teaching. Still, it was my time to give back to the community, and this is how I chose to do so. The problem is, I make $17.35 per hour after four years of school, graduating with honors, and continuing on with my master’s degree this year. My eight-hour-day rate in teaching doesn’t take into consideration that I actually live my job, often spending more than 12 hours preparing for each day’s challenges. This is just $7.35 more than uneducated, unskilled workers hope to make.
Something is wrong with our priorities here. I’ve made my bed salary-wise and am content to lie in it; however, I can’t miss the opportunity to point out that teachers are still grossly underpaid.
Nancy Bassett, Denver
. . .
It is infuriating when one considers that members of Congress retire on their salary, control our Social Security, and just recently denied the poorest segment of our society a raise in the meager minimum wage.
Add to that that the log jam in Congress couldn’t come to a compromise because of the Republican estate tax issue on multimillionaires (you can have yours only if I get mine), so the whole boat sunk and everybody went home.
Most infuriating is that Congress has voted itself $29,000 in raises over the last decade and during the same time, we have had zero increases in the minimum wage while they will work only about 80 days this year.
Roger Fulton, Yuma, Ariz.
. . .
Re: “Struggling in a war of wages,” Aug. 4 news story.
Raising the minimum wage is inflationary, as all businesses must raise prices to pay higher wages. It also allows illegal immigrants to send more money home if they currently are able to and provide more incentive to stay illegally. If fewer illegal immigrants stay in the U.S., legal residents will see wages increase as the excess labor (illegals) is removed from the labor market. The reason there are still many minimum wage jobs in this country is that there are many illegal immigrants who will work for that pay. I recommend voting against the Colorado minimum-wage initiative this fall.
Russ Clark, Englewood
. . .
I got my first job (other than a paper route when I was in high school) in 1967. I was 18, and about the only skills I had were a strong back and a remarkable ability to memorize the lyrics to popular songs and sing them off-key. I made $1.65/hour – minimum wage at the time – serving breakfasts in the cafeteria at the University of Pittsburgh dormitories. Though I had an academic scholarship covering tuition and books, that job allowed me to take much of the financial burden of supporting me off of my parents. One dollar and sixty-five cents sounds like slave wages these days, but after adjusting for inflation, that would be the equivalent of almost $10/hour today.
The minimum wage should be raised. This is a simple matter of economic justice. The ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage in Colorado to $6.85 and hour should be supported by workers, consumers and business simply because it is right to do so. No one should have to toil all day long and come home with a paycheck that will not support them and their family.
Michael Adams, Lafayette
To the point
The oil companies are clamoring to drill in ANWR, asserting that it will not harm the environment. Now, pipelines are shut down, because BP neglected maintenance to extract a little more profit. Do you really believe the oil companies will protect the environment?
Stephen Blecher, Littleton
. . .
Help me out here – BP had a profit of more than $19 billion in 2005 and can’t maintain pipelines. I don’t get it.
Steve Wells, Longmont
. . .
The only thing that sustains me during this most recent escalation of violence threatening to engulf the entire Middle East is the serene knowledge imparted by our top government officials that the world is a so much safer place ever since we removed Saddam Hussein from power.
David Eichenberger, Littleton
. . .
As any wise sailor would know, President Bush needs to realize that when you “stay the course,” you will, sooner or later, run aground.
Jay Hodge, Franktown
. . .
Centrist Democrats are like violins without strings. Gutless.
John Cleveland, Centennial
Cultural comparisons
Re: “Cultural comparisons are realistic,” Aug. 6 John Andrews column.
It seems that John Andrews, Dick Lamm and Bill Owens have blinders on when it comes to culture. They want to cite only statistics that prove their point while eliminating all other data. To see that high school dropout rates are more of a result of economic status than ethnic background, all you have to do is look at Appalachia. In these poor, mostly white areas of our country, the dropout rate is at or above 50 percent.
I wonder if Andrews looks at the military and thinks that African-Americans and Hispanics are more patriotic that Jews and Asians. If you look at the stats, African-Americans represent 20 percent of our military force. In addition, the Department of Defense states that Latinos ages 18-24 simply showed a “higher propensity to serve” than other ethnic groups. This shows that Andrews, Lamm, Owens and others are just trying to make headlines and political gains even if it means using blinders to ignore the truth.
Patrick Anderson, Centennial
Global warming
I agree with letter-writer Doug Curtis’ assessment of the current state of our planet with regards to global warming (Aug. 6 Open Forum). Technology is certainly one viable answer, but there is another solution that is available to all humans on the face of the earth, right here, right now, without further research or developments. It’s a solution that would reduce personal annual greenhouse emissions by 1.5 tons. It would drastically reduce the emission of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, the main culprits causing the greenhouse effect. It would all but end deforestation, which is currently occurring at a rate of 50 to 100 acres per minute. It could eliminate 1 billion tons of waste entering U.S. waterways every year. And it would increase fossil-fuel efficiency from five to 1,000 times in terms of expenditure per food calorie produced. This simple solution would also ease the drought concerns, as it is estimated that 80 percent of all water used in this industry goes directly or indirectly to its “final product.” By comparison, all domestic water consumption by private individuals is less than 5 percent of the total water consumed.
Does all of this sound too good to be true? It’s such a simple solution. I challenge each and every one of you to change your diet, as I have. Go vegetarian. Better yet, go vegan. It’s easier than you think. If I can do it, anyone can. Do it for the animals involved in the horrendous factory farming industries. Do it for yourself, for the health benefits of a plant-based diet. And do it for the health of the planet we all call home. Think about it. It’s not too late. But it soon will be.
Gabe Groves, Littleton
Editor’s note: The statistics in this letter come from the Vegetarian Society of Colorado and farmusa.org.
Achievement gap
Re: “Fix achievement gap in Colorado,” Aug. 6 guest commentary.
Year after year, I see the same kind of article, wondering why there is a racial achievement gap in Colorado schools. I’ve been an educator for more than 30 years, and sad but true, socioeconomic factors are still the major influences in student achievement at all levels.
Generally speaking – though there are many exceptions – better-educated parents raise better-educated children, and poorly educated parents raise poorly educated children. The social expectations of parents in these two groups are often at odds, and have been for centuries. Will our institutions be able to mount a campaign that will finally be able to overcome these socioeconomic barriers? Not without the desire and efforts of parents.
Perhaps what this state needs is to fund parent education courses for those who want to be able to help and support their children’s academic success. The education of a child is a partnership between parent and teacher. I always tell parents they are the most important teacher in their child’s life, and I am here to assist them in this process. If the partnership is dysfunctional, then the results will generally reflect this breakdown.
As a whole, today’s society is very dysfunctional, so why wouldn’t we expect to see this reflected in our schools? Our priorities are not with hard work and nurturing intelligence, but the recreational and material pursuits guided by the almighty dollar.
We can’t fix our educational systems without fixing our societal values. We are becoming a two-class society of haves and have-nots, and achievement scores are a reflection of this economic truth.
Deborah Dosh-Healy, Evergreen
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