As an Argentine, I prefer a Republican to win. As Matthew said, they are more interested in war, and fortunately, they are not aiming at us right now. And Democrats know about economy and are usually the ones that try to press Argentina the most for commercial treaties that put us in disadvantages.

Sorry Evil Axis, you will have to withstand some more attacks for our benefit

Ron Paul, the guy who contracts spammers with botnets?

No. Minimum wage does not need to be increased. Let us suppose for a moment that after taxes, minimum wage works out to being only $3/hr. This is false, the government doesn't take that much from lower income people, but I am exaggerating the example.

One can get by eating rather well on only $100 each month. That takes up down to $380 to spend. Let's also factor in rent and utilities, which one can squeeze by at $200/month in most places if not less (such as living with other people.) We're down to $180 spending cash. Okay okay, you need to have a car, huh? That'll be another $80/month in gas. You have $100 to spend this month still.

If you know how to budget your money you can make ends meet under minimum wage. I get paid only a little bit more than that (minimum wage, not $3/hr) myself as a graduate student and I have plenty of money to spare because I spend it properly. (I have no car, either, which helps.)

Edit: That brings us to another point as well: there really is no excuse to work minimum wage if you live in America. (Unless you are a teenager.) As long as you have done well in high school, the government will give you money to go to community college. I got money to go to school! Then you can work your way up into higher income brackets. Shouldn't people who work harder get rewarded more? I don't think that teenagers need more spending money than minimum wage gives them.

Where do you live? Arouynd here, a single bedroom costs around 400, not including parking space, garbage pickup, electricity, phone, and other utilities. And of course, the cheaper you go, the shittier the neighborhood.

Don't forget a hundred or two for insurance. Plus actually buying the car if you don't have one in the first place. And god forbid it breaks down...

First off there's now way you can live off $400 a month acceptably. Eating well is certainly not $100 a month, I spend about $50-100 a week on groceries and I don't eat out at all (so I'm technically saving money). My rent is over the $400 a month mark here and unless you know someone who is willing to actually subsidize you (or you live on the floor or living room), you won't get rent for less then 325 or so a month (including utilities), and that's for an extremely crappy place. Finally gas is the least relevant part of the car. Insurance will cost more then car probably costs.

Now try to feed a family with the $400. See how far you get.

Why are you guys complaining about minimum wage? You want more money, go improve your station in life. Don't cry to the government to make that mean employer give you a raise for nothing.

There needs to be some fair minimum wage because unchecked capitalism doesn't work. Why? Well all it takes is one company to employ people who will work for nothing, and then they can keep their prices low. We frugal Americans will then go buy from them, driving the other places out of business.

I don't think minimum wage needs to be something one can live off of, but it should be enough to make the job worthwhile. Because otherwise you'll get working conditions that force twenty people to live in a two bedroom apartment. (How do you think illegal immigrants work for less than minimum wage?)

Personally, I would just like to see minimum wage set to some amount (that lets a single person live without any extravagance) and then raised annually for inflation. So if you work at an unskilled position, you'll never get a real raise. You'll always be working for minimum wage. If you ever want to make more, then you'll need to try to better yourself.

They do "deserve" it, no doubt. But that's not how capitalism works. If everybody got paid by how hard they worked physically, well then we programmers wouldn't make very much.

Someone who actually does that won't be making minimum wage for long now will he?

What country do you live in?
By not making minimum wage for long do you mean that staggering quarter or fifty cent raise that amounts to just about nothing?

The truth is that if you want to make more money then you need to have some kind of degree / certification. Most people on minimum wage can't afford to take out big loans for school while working 50 hours a week just to meet expenses and still manage to put in enough time to actually do well in school and actually graduate someday too.

That's not what I meant at all , of course I think that highly skilled and trained positions deserve more reward than simple labors. The problem is that its very difficult to break out of the minimum wage cycle for unskilled workers. Working long hour weeks just to break even with little time left over to dedicate to training and education means that its very difficult to climb the social ladder because it isn't even in reach!

That translates to 5 American cents... oh wait, I cannot say that anymore.

Pay attention much? I'm talking about people working on minimum wage where there generally aren't many options for promotion above grunt labor class III which is probably about $6 or $6.50 if you're lucky.

Are "most" if not "all" of the people you know living at home instead of on their own? For a community college 2 year degree you probably need to earn about 65 credit hours to graduate. If you sleep 8 hours a day that leaves 16 hours a day for daily tasks. Subtract about 4 hours a day for cooking , eating , showering , and travel to and from work. That leaves 12 hours a day. If you're working 50 hours a week that's 7 hours less per day to study and go to classes. So what you have left for schooling is about 5 hours a day minus whatever chores and other things come up that you have to do. A 3 credit hour class probably takes about 12 hours or so per week including going to class so then you could fit in about 9 credit hours of class per semester with absolutely no free time left over. (5 X 7 = 35 , 35 / 12 = 3 classes)
So 65 credit hours / 9 credit hours per semester is about 7 semesters of work for a 2 year degree. That's four years to get a 2 year degree working your butt off with no free time. So anyone who can't manage to do that is lazy? Pulling that off seems rather extraordinary to me.

As far as who I would like to see be the next President my two favorites would be Barack Obama and John Edwards.

I'm running out of posts, but I have to say something about minimum wage.

There's a lot of talk about "If you want to be paid more, then you should better yourself and pick up some new skills". Fine, I can accept that argument, in the sense that we should premier people for making themselves more useful. But what people are often forgetting is that doing that is hardly a trivial task for someone living on minimum wage.

Being constantly scant for cash is stressful. Simply the absence of money in itself can be highly worrisome (and I speak from personal experience here). Add to this the inability to afford recreation, the inability to have a proper diet and clothing. If you have a family, your money is going to be stretched even more thinly, plus you need to add the constant worry about being able to support your children and send them to school, etc. Low-paying blue collar jobs are also often more dangerous or unsanitary than higher-paying white collar jobs, meaning that you're often going to be more likely to be injured or have health problems; and, in the United States, that also means that since you might not be able to afford health insurance, your health is only going to deteriorate. Many people have to get second jobs just to support their families, taking more time from their hands and adding more stress. Many people succumb to depression or stress-related illnesses. When you have to pinch every penny every day just to get by, feelings of hopelessness and helplessness are going to run rampant.

To sum up the above paragraph: Poverty is self-reinforcing. Poor people aren't going to experience an upward trend because of being motivated by their poverty, they're going to experience a significant downward trend because poverty makes it difficult or even impossible to better oneself. You're constantly having to play catch-up to even survive. Try finding the time, resources, or willpower to sink into learning a skill. We can't expect people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps if they have no boots.

If we as a society want to have more skilled workers, and really want everyone to be able to use their skills to earn a decent living and make a good life for themselves, we need to recognize that poverty isn't going to fix itself, and we certainly can't rely on the private sector to fix it for us. Without sounding too conspiratorial, the corporate system is only going to benefit from having a large, underpaid corpus of workers who are desperate enough to forgo things like safety, decent wages, job security, rights in the workplace, etc. It's not in most corporations' best interests to educate people.

Finally, there's the issue of racism. Poverty is over-represented among ethnic minorities, which in turn is the reason why crime rates are so higher among those demographics. It does no one any good to ignore this issue; a lot of people are missing out on jobs or promotions because of their race. As a result, people again grow more desperate and become increasingly willing to settle for less, even below where you can make a decent living. Many stray to a life of crime, as mentioned.

So what is the answer? Some have suggested raising minimum wages, and while that might be a start, it feels too much like a "Let's throw money at it and hope it goes away" answer, which rarely work. What I'd rather like to see is something like:

• Support for labor unions. When a lone individual can't help himself, others in the same situation might be able to if they band together. Strengthening of workers' rights in their workplace in general is a good idea.

• State-sponsored training programs for undereducated workers. They need to be cheap or even free for people to be able to attend them, and they need to be available to everyone, and people need to be informed that they exist.

• Higher wages. Yes, I know what I just said, but if you can't support yourself on a minimum wage as it is, you're not going to be able to have the time or money to train anyway. Plus, people having more money stimulates the economy in general, encouraging the flow of money and the exchange of goods.

• Universal health care. Taking the burden of health insurance off of people's minds is going to mean that poor people will be able to afford health care, and thus will be healthier and more capable of working, as well as taking away a major source of worry.

• Better immigration policies. It's slightly tangential, but because poverty is such a big problem among immigrant populations, it needs to be addressed. I'm not a fan of affirmative action at all, but there needs to be a systematic improvement of attitudes towards immigrant workers.

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If I missed anything... sorry, I might not be able to respond to anything you say. It's not my fault.

A few responses to others...

So you're willing to complain about a faulty rewards system, but only as reasoning for a worse one?

You silly person. Minimum wage will do nothing to fix the kissing ass = $ problem. If you really are against this problem than get off your ass and do something about it.

This is just silly. Allow me to demonstrate.

Hopefully its clear why investors packing their bags wouldn't be a good thing. These sort of ideas, while initially sounding admirable, eventually show themselves to be a glorified "Gimme something for nothing" attitude commonly seen in children. We all want everything given to us, however, its the ones who quit whining and get to work that get rich -- and in doing so produce what is necessary to keep our country functioning.

These ideas are also blatantly stupid and show a totally disregard for and lack of understand towards how the world works and how we've managed to get as far as we have. You can't simply create a better solution by destroying the one we have. All you'll do is kill us all.

My posts getting long here but I really want to give one more example of why this is silly.

Here is a fictional story...
Take a tribe of 3 settlers. One man hunts using his bare hands every day, catching a small animal every other day. One man builds a bow and arrow and hunts every other day, catching two large animals. The third man reads his the bible and prays each night, catching no animals.

Clearly, the first man works the hardest. Lets say he deserves, and receives, a larger cut of the meat than the second man each night. The third man, who preaches every day, receives a cut equal to the first man.

On one particular month it is particularly cold and most of the animals migrate away. The priest of the group tells them to keep at it and to maintain the same progressive meat distribution policy. They struggle through the month, surviving by the skin of their teeth.

The next month the animal shortage remains the same. The 1st man, being friends with the priest, gets him alone to ask a favor.

"Its not fair, he has his bow while I spend all day hunting with my bare hands. The little rations I have cannot sustain me because I work so hard. I cannot learn to build my own bow because I'm too busy hunting! I simply need more rations to survive."

"Do not worry, at the next fire I will read from my bible about how in times of need the hunter who works hard must be given full rations."

And so it was the group decreed that the 1st man must be given his full ration and the priest must receive the remainder in order to maintain their connection with the gods.

Two weeks later the 2nd man grew ill from lack of food and could not hunt. "Do not worry," the 1st man reassured him. "I will hunt all day to bring us back to sustenance. Once we are there we will feast as kings. However we cannot risk our last able hunter going unfed."

The 1st man hunted and hunted but could not even feed himself. He began eating what he could catch immediately, so as to hide it from the priest. Soon the 2nd man died of starvation and the priest soon fallowed.

Alone, the unskilled hunter cursed at his dead companions. How could the priest not lead them out of their struggle? How could the other hunter not pull his own weight? Why, the man asked, did he suffer at their inability to be progressive and adapt to these wonderful new ideas.

As he breathed his last breath, he sighed an inauthentic mummer and gave up, proclaiming that human behavior wasn't ready for his progressive ideas.

Back to responses...

Interesting, its nice to get a perspective from somebody actually in the mix. I wonder what exaggerates the bad press?