January 8, 2015

Ricardo Mor
The Miami Center of Architecture & Design

RE: Some observations on your unlinkable OP-ED plea in today’s Miami Herald for “fairness” in the form of a living wage.

Mr. Mor,

In the 1980s I “created” more than 400 jobs in 5 states, the highest of which paid $43,000 a year. The people I hired doubtless helped to “create” still more jobs through their purchases of the necessities of life. I have heard that 7 is the accepted multiplier for indirect jobs. I am proud of that number because the number of jobs “created” by the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the ‘80s was zero.

That’s zero as in none.

You write that the MIT Living Wage Calculator says that $10.79 an hour is the minimum needed to earn a living wage in this county. Are you suggesting that this elusive “living wage” can vary from county to county? Vide Putnam County in northeast Florida. Its poverty rate is 26.4%. Its unemployment rate is 9.4%. What should its minimum wage be?

If they are unemployed, and worse, unemployable at $7.25 an hour how would raising it help them? If $10.79 is good wouldn’t $20.79 be better? Why stop there? $30.79 would have them farting through silk, if not really than vicariously, right? Instinct tells me that groups of unemployed people frequently talk about how good it feels to be unemployed at a higher minimum wage. It’s make you forget about an empty stomach.

Let me add that I was thrice employed at the minimum wage. Further, I was fired from one of them.

I have a feeling for these things, an instinct, and a highly sensitive nose that tells me that you have never signed both sides of a pay check. The back is for those being paid while the front is for those paying. If you are an acolyte in the school of “You Didn’t Build That” nonsense the difference is unexplainably alien and impossible to even remotely grasp. I’m sure you remember Candidate Obama telling Joe the Plumber that he wanted to “spread the wealth around”. Alas, the boob still doesn’t realize that you have to “create” it before you can “spread” it.

Of course, for people who believed him when he said he would “cool the earth and calm the seas”, all disbelief is voluntarily suspended.

Was that study from the same MIT that employs Jonathan Gruber and Noam Chomsky? Gruber would and has stolen many hot stoves because he knows that the people in the kitchen are “stupid”. Worse, they’ll help him steal them. For 6 decades Chomsky has built the ideological construct that is supposed to justify and sanctify the theft of same.

Finally, am I the only one to note that you and Johnny Manziel are dead ringers? I am not sure what you do for a living but you have a future as a stand in when your evil twin heads to the wild side of town.





Kevin Smith
WARRIORBARDIT @BELLSOUTH.NET