Smack

I'm going the miscellaneous route again today, and I'll be starting with this piece that I happened across today:

http://rawstory.com/2009/12/fox-news-cutting-minimum-wage-better-workers/

The long and short of that is that someone on Fox News suggested that lowering or removing minimum wage restrictions would somehow be better for workers. The line of thinking there seems to be that lower wages would allow companies to hire more workers. Okay, yes, it would allow them to do this if they so chose. But no company actually would hire more workers if minimum wages were reduced or removed. They would simply continue to use the bare minimum number of people to run day-to-day operations, and it would cost them even less. I'm talking about your big retail companies, of course, your Wal-Mart's and your McDonald's and other such places. Minimum wages don't even exist in places where you have to wear a suit and tie to work, so it wouldn't make a lick of difference there. So you would have your Wal-Mart's and McDonald's paying their already dirt-poor employees even less, and bringing in no additional help to alleviate the strain these people work under because they are understaffed because those companies won't chop a few bucks off of their millionaire and billionaire executives' payrolls to make those folks just a little less miserable at their job. But wait, I've got more on this. People who make minimum wage can't exist on that kind of pay. If you work full-time and make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, you alone can't pay for rent and groceries and electricity and a phone and a car and gas and car insurance, all of which are pretty well essential in today's world. You have to have at least one roommate, or a spouse, or someone to share the bills with. And even then, you won't exactly be living a luxurious life. Clearly, minimum wage is, if anything, too low. So, if you take away minimum wage, you theoretically could have a situation in which companies could hire more employees (they wouldn't), which would only result in more people making less than their already non-liveable wages. Now, what kind of sense does that make?

Next up, we've got this story coming from right here in the Cincinnati area that's got people all up-in-arms, as people are wont to get. It was discovered that some workers in a church-run daycare center had given small doses of melatonin to some children who were overly energetic during nap-time. Of course, the knee-jerk reaction of almost everyone to this news was to scream for the heads of those workers. Bullshit, I say. Sometimes, kids are little bastards who need to be calmed down. It's not as though the kids were given hard drugs or anything. Melatonin occurs naturally in the body anyway; it's just a damn supplement. Now yes, common sense says that the supervisors at the daycare should have maybe asked the parents of these kids if they would permit something like this to settle the kids down during nap-time. At the same time, though, let's be perfectly frank. This is not that big of a deal. This is not something worth getting pissed off about. You slap the daycare workers on the wrist, tell them to ask before they do something like that again, they apologize, apologies are accepted, end of story. Is that how it's going to go down? You better believe it's not! Because people like nothing better than to get all indignant about things that aren't worth getting indignant about.

Now, ain't that fun?