Posted by Agent J on July 14, 2003 at 10:44:21:
San Francisco Chronicle July 11, 2003
AS STIMULATING AS A TAX CUT ----- A LIVING WAGE
They're handing out tax cuts like free samples to the folks who don't need them,
but the congressional hand-wringing about raising the minimum wage lumbers on.
The federal minimum of $5.15 an hour - unchanged in six years - is so low that
a full-time job still leaves a single parent with one child about 12 percent
below the federal poverty line.
When President Franklin Roosevelt supported the establishment of a federal
minimum wage in the mid-1930s, he argued that "no business which depends for
existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to exist
in this country."
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See Image Above:
In 2000, the annual self-sufficiency wage for two working adults with two school-aged children was $45,605 in the Bay Area. Over a quarter of Bay Area families did not make enough to be self-sufficient, and about 8% of Bay Area families fell below the 2000 Federal Poverty Level of $17,050 annually for a family of four.