A Minimum Wage for Minimum Achievement

I am sick and tired of hearing the whiners complain, Save Jerseyans, particularly about how Wal-Mart, McDonalds and the like don’t pay enough.

That is precisely why we supposedly have a free market; if you don’t like the job you are in at the moment, you are “free” to get an education and leave for a better position.
McDonald’s wasn’t meant to be a career choice or your dream job, nor was it designed to pay a livable wage.

It is an entry level job, a job that teaches an unskilled person people skills, the ability to learn how to count, make change, and what it means to be on time for your shift . . . responsibility.

McDonald’s, dishwashers and start up positions like it are jobs for those who have no prior work experience, or to supplement ones income.

It is a proving ground to learn the skills needed in business, a stepping stone to the corporate world.
There are workers who complain they have worked 10 years flipping burgers without a raise. If you are flipping burgers for 10 years and didn’t take the initiative in all those years to educate yourself, it comes down to plain laziness.

These jobs were meant for high school students, college students and people looking for a PT job for a little extra cash. Even now, in the Obama economy, the vast majority of these positions are filled by young kids or folks earning a secondary household income.

Expecting to earn a wage to support a family, pay your rent, groceries, car insurance and medical bills was brought on by many who lacked an education and now expect to survive on the backs of all those who learned the skills needed to better themselves.

Coming here without an education and then complaining you don’t earn enough to get an education is not everyone else’s responsibility. The ineptness and incompetency of those low wage earners is not the obligation of everyone else that worked those jobs to gain the job skills need to move forward and ahead.

It is unfair to those who were employed in those low skilled jobs while working their way through school, to pay more for a product simply because the current crop of low wage earners now feel this is now their permanent job. To add insult to injury, hourly pay for these jobs is now tied-in with the cost of living.

Keep in mind that these are the same minimum wage earners who can’t make change when the power goes out, because the computer isn’t able to tell them how much change you get back, but yet feel that after years of flipping a burger or washing dishes feel they deserve a raise simply because of longevity.

One reason out of many that minimum wage jobs are becoming a scarcity for today’s teenagers is due to a lack of turnover because these are the new full-time jobs for the uneducated or unmotivated.

As minimum wage increases, along with the COLA, increased costs will be passed on to the consumer. The end result is we just created a higher minimum wage without creating any great impetus for social mobility in an American society desperately in need of it!

Tags: career, education, employee, employer, hourly, job, labor, minimum, new jersey, NJ, rate, salary, teenager, unemployment, wage

 

Obama's Absurd Healthcare Fix

Obama is now back tracking saying you can keep your health plan. Well just how do you do that after you received your cancellation notice?

Obama also says most people won’t want to, anyway, and that anyone who’s had an individual policy canceled to look at what’s available at Healthcare.gov before they look to reinstate their old policy.

This guy is a walking book of contradictions.

Roughly 85% of Americans have insurance. Out of a population of approximately 317 million, about 11 million people have policies on the individual market. 

Out of that 11 million, at least 4.2 million Americans have been sent cancellation notices by their insurers.  People, who were kicked off of a plan they liked and could afford that, are now facing higher premiums and deductibles.

Aside from the reason why Obamacare had to be passed for 10% of the nation’s population, insurance companies and commissioners across the country now face the daunting task of deciding how they are going to handle already-cancelled health-care policies under the president’s new administrative ‘fix’ for the Affordable Care Act.

By reinstating cancelled policies, that means that these insurance companies will need to issue coverage that doesn’t meet Affordable Care Act standards.

And it’s not so easy for an insurance company to reinstate a policy, because those companies need to plan premiums and budget for expenses far in advance of issuing a policy.

Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the new law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers, as premiums have already been set for next year based on an assumption of when consumers will be transitioning to the new marketplace.

Each state has regulations of its own that a plan needs to comply with before it can be offered. Many of those canceled plans no longer meet state regulations; even ones that do would need to be approved by the responsible state agency and with less than two months to go in the calendar year, it won’t happen.

It’s almost the New Year and a quick fix for this mess won’t be that swift.

The insurance companies better have all hands on deck to prepare for this administration’s 2014 mid-term, because if this so called temporary fix doesn’t work it won’t be Obama’s fault as their ship heads towards Davy Jones Locker.