IN MY SHOES: What It’s Like To Live On $7.25 Per Hour
The debate continues to rage over the microeconomic effects on individual firms and businesses of raising the minimum wage from the current, $5.15 an hour, to $7.25 an hour. The Washington Post details a payday in the life of Robert Iles, 22, an Atchison, KS, store cashier who’s been living on $7.25 per hour for almost a year now – his boss had given him a raise last February:
"[I]nside I was doing the cha-cha-cha. It was like going from lower class to lower middle class."
Soon after, he bought his car, a used 2005 Dodge Neon, and just about every workday since then he has spent his lunch break in the driver's seat, eating a bologna sandwich with the engine off to save gas, even in winter. An hour later, he was back behind the cash register, telling customers "Thank you and have a nice day" again and again. …
Iles lives with his disabled father (legally blind, with both feet partially amputated due to diabetic complications and battling leukemia) and his mother (a former nursing home aide who quit her $6.50-per-hour job to care for her husband) in "an old trailer" with no heat and sporadically available hot water – and a bedroom ceiling that’s caving in. Iles told the Post, "We're pretty much living off my money."
Seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour comes to $15,080 per year - $900 per month. After paying his bills, Iles "very rarely" has money for himself:
$313 for the car loan and $100 for car insurance; an additional $90 for the 1995 car with 135,000 miles on it he is buying for his mother; $150 for the family phone bills; $35 on his credit card; $100 for gas; $100 toward the mortgage on the trailer; and $20 in doctors' bills.
It’s quitting time, and Isles has $70 in "in a wallet that had been empty that morning," and he wants to treat his family to chimichangas, plus take care of a few expenses:
[H]e headed to a grocery store where for $4.98 he bought not only 10 chimichangas but two burritos as well.
From there he stopped at a convenience store, where for $16.70 he filled the gas tank of [his] car; then he went to another grocery store, where he got a $21.78 money order to pay down some bills, including $8,000 in medical bills from the day he accidentally sliced open several fingers with a knife while trying to cut a tomato; and then he headed toward the family trailer 19 miles away, where his parents were waiting for dinner. …
[I]n a matter of minutes was already down to $26.54 …
Editorial Note: This young man should be going out with his friends now and then for a beer or a ballgame, taking his special girl out to dinner and a movie once a week and saving up for his own home – even if it’s "just" a trailer. Instead, he lives a life of quiet desperation due to Dickensian family circumstances, unable to live or plan past payday. The Stiletto admits his story made her cry.
Instead of focusing on the microeconomics of raising the minimum wage, we should focus on the microeconomics of illegal immigration. If companies of all sizes stopped hiring illegal aliens to do jobs that Americans are eager to do, pockets of labor shortages in certain industries and locations will occur. The law of supply and demand will force affected employers to hire Americans at $7.25 an hour - or even a bit higher – to fill those jobs. Sure, the costs will eventually be passed on to consumers. But the lives of our fellow Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder will be a bit better. And the money these employees earn will be spent right here in America – not sent back to Mexico by the fistfuls – which, in turn will boost the local economies of towns like Atchison instead of destroying them.
The Stiletto has a message for Nancy "Pay-Go" Pelosi: To offset the amount consumers will ultimately PAY for the minimum wage increase by shelling out more for goods and services, use any legislative means necessary to make illegal aliens GO.
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