I’ve
never personally tried to do the stunt that many politically-minded people are
taking on these days – living for a week on an amount of money they estimate
they would have if they were to earn only the minimum wage for a salary.
Perhaps
it’s because I have memories of the days in decades past when I earned salaries
that were at, or barely above, minimum wage. I remember how tight financially
things were. I don’t need to engage in a silly symbolic stunt to prove a point.
PARTICULARLY
SINCE IT always seems that the person doing the stunt always manages to
reinforce whatever ideological hang-ups they carried with them prior to the
test. What really gets proved?
For
the record, the most recent person to take on this alleged test is Gov. Pat
Quinn, who estimated that after paying for housing, travel and taxes, a minimum
wage-salaried person has only $79 to last for the week.
So
he’s going about with only that sum of cash for the week. If he runs out, he’s
broke – in a symbolic sense.
He’s
been quick to tell us of his banana for breakfast, or how he couldn’t order the
deluxe hamburger for lunch and had to settle for the child’s menu version
instead.
HIS
LATEST FUNDRAISING e-mail message tells us that Quinn is, “draw(ing) attention
to the struggles that far too many Illinois families face every single day.”
Although
I also remember when an Indianapolis radio broadcaster (whom I knew back in the
days when he was a Springfield, Ill. Broadcaster) took on a similar challenge
(and wrote about it all over his Facebook page) and went out of his way to claim
that holding down his expenses was no big deal.
As
though people who couldn’t confine their spending to minimum wage were somehow
being wasteful. Although I suspect what many of the ideologues really believe
is that some people aren’t entitled to have certain things. Or else maybe they
really believe they’re better than the rest of us and somehow are entitled to
finer items in life.
My
guess is that is what they are thinking these days now that the tidbit has come
out that Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bruce Rauner is a member of a private
club that charges him in excess of $100,000 per year to buy wine made from
grapes grown at the Napa Valley Reserve.
PERSONALLY,
I’M NOT a wine fanatic. I don’t know how wonderous the wine from this
particular place is. I also appreciate that people have a right to spend their
own money on whatever luxuries they particularly desire.
But
Quinn is going out of his way to let us know he’s going broke for a week while
Rauner is guzzling down (or so he’d have us believe) unique wines that most of
us couldn’t even dream of buying.
Whether
people will buy into that line of logic is uncertain. We’ll have to wait and
see come Nov. 4 for the vote tallies. Although I think there has been enough
evidence to show that Rauner isn’t like the majority of us (he once
self-described himself as part of the “0.0001 percent” of society).
But
I’m not sure that someone who has been a part of public life for as many
decades as Quinn can truly claim to be a part of us either – even if he’s using
his latest campaign ad to show himself mowing his own lawn.
A
COMMON MAN touch similar to how Dawn Clark Netsch shot pool in her 1994
campaign ads? That was gimmicky too, just as the so-called minimum wage test
is.
For
the reality of living life poor is that you don’t just get to do it for a week,
then know that things will return to normal. It becomes a condition that
becomes such a permanent mindset that it is next-to-impossible to figure things
will ever change.
It
makes me think the minimum wage test tells us less than those people who are
having water buckets dumped over their heads to show solidarity with those suffering
from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
It
makes me wonder if Lou Gehrig himself would want to knock a foul ball into the
stands off of one of these peoples’ heads; in hopes of knocking some sense into
their craniums.
-30-
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