Why not make Minimum Wage $100/hr?

States Look For Ways To Help Uninsured:

At least 10 states are considering “pay or play” legislation that would require employers of a certain size either to provide basic health care coverage to employees or contribute to a state fund to cover public health care costs, says the study, by Hewitt Associates Inc., Lincolnshire, Ill.

That’s certainly an interesting proposal. I have my own proposal: Why don’t they just mandate that every company of a certain size provide a check for $100,000 to each employee every year. My own, admittedly poor, inductive reasoning tells me that people who have $100,000 in the bank don’t generally have a problem paying for health care. I think my solution will have the same effect as this “pay or play” legislation, only perhaps to a greater degree. After all, everyone will have $100,000! This solution will have the added bonus of solving poverty and hunger. I don’t know any truly hungry people who make six figures.

My employer doesn’t necessarily “provide” me with health care. They just budget a certain amount of money to pay me, a certain amount for my benefits, and a certain amount to pay taxes. All of that money could be used for my salary, if the other two categories didn’t exist, and it likely would, if they wanted to remain competitive.

Speaking of competition, that’s kind of the whole point of providing health care in the first place. In the end, whether you as an employer are spending a dollar on health care or spending a dollar on an employee’s salary, it has the same exact effect on your bottom line. Some employers can compete for employees without incurring the cost of providing health care to said employees. Some cannot. I happen to have a job where in order to remain competitive, my employer offers health and other benefits to its employees.

And 20 states are considering publicizing the names of companies whose employees receive public health care assistance.

What good does this cause? There’s been a big brouhaha in Georgia because 1 in 16 children in a public assistance program had a parent who worked for Walmart, and the media reports all implied that Walmart is taking advantage of the government programs’ “picking up the slack” because they don’t pay the employees enough. But what does that really mean? People in lower income brackets are going to be on public assistance, it seems, whether they are employed or not. Unless over 11,000 jobs were to magically appear, those people would be unemployed without Walmart. Why didn’t the media spin it the other way? The headline could have easily read “Walmart Gives More Poor People Jobs Than Any Other Employer In State”.

And, since I mentioned my job twice in this post– Everything I write here or anywhere else is my own personal opinion, and should not be construed to be the opinion of my employer. I claim full responsibility for my post, which is not written in any official capacity for any company.

Thinking this morning about the evolution textbook/sticker debate that has raged on in classrooms, board meetings, and courts across the land, I thought it would be funny to see a sticker required on copies of The Bible, with language similar to the stickers the anti-science crowd wants on biology textbooks.

Of course, to avoid duplication of effort, I went ahead and Googled it to see if such a parody sticker exists. Here’s what I found:

WARNING!!!
This bible is made up of stories, not facts. Serious disagreement among biblical scholars has existed for thousands of years about these stories. The stories in this bible should not be taken as literal truth or as facts. There are hundreds of other religious stories throughout the world that contradict and call into question the stories in this bible. This bible should therefore be approached with a spirit of critical consideration.

From http://blogs.lawrence.com/yellowdog/2005/feb/10/mythnotfact/

Pretty good. I am not in a position to, nor do I have the desire to, bring the Bible into question here. I just question the motives of people who selectively argue against teaching science to children correctly.

Why don’t they complain about the theory of electromagnetism, the germ theory of disease, and the theory of gravity? They’re just theories too! Nobody wants a sticker warning kids about other theories because these others don’t conflict with their specific religious beliefs. That’s the only reason, in my opinion, that there’s even an issue. Why? Most of the non-scientists injecting themselves into this debate seem to care very little about other science-related issues, even areas of science about which there is real, scientific debate.

Evolution is the central organizing theory of biology, and has fundamental importance in other sciences as well. It is no more controversial in scientific circles than gravity or electricity is…And, regardless of whether the changes in plants and animals are gradual or sporadic, the facts remain that plants and animals have evolved over time. There is no scientific dispute that evolution has occurred and continues to occur; this is why evolution is regarded as a scientific fact. (State of California, 1989)