Edith Lepe

February 1, 2015
Political Science 1
Proffesor Hamman
States Rights
The definition of states rights is that aside from the Constitution
making any sort of decisions the states are also able to make their own
decisions. But thats only if that federal government didnt take any
actions. There are different levels of government but because the
states are supposed to be coequal to the national government they
have to wait and see if theyre going to handle a certain situation or
not.

I couldnt really find a specific article that mentioned both federal and
states opinions in the topic about minimum wage. The information I did
find though talks about the history of poverty caused by minimum
wage in the United States. These articles arent very up to date
because the minimum wage now is $9 an hour, but everything has
remained the same.

The president himself has mentioned that people who suffer from
poverty and are stuck working full time jobs for a low pay deserve to
live well. Although the pay has increased in over the past few years it
is lower than what it was in 1968. But legislation has considered raising
it to $10. It still wont be enough to improve the percentage in poverty.
According to the Commonweal article those making the minimum earn
below the poverty percentage per year.

There hasnt been much news about this topic because its realistic

that poverty will take a very long time to end. The government does
want it to improve because the money that comes from taxpayers is
being used to take care of the low-income families that cant afford to
put food on the table or pay medical bills. Around $90 billion goes into
all the resources that are available for those who qualify as low
income. Mead Lawrence the author of the article said,Many in
Washington believe that poverty deserves more attention, yet they approach the
problem with great caution. It is a very sensitive subject because if the pay does
change there will be less people getting hired. So it wont make a huge difference
for everyone just some.

Crying poverty
Commentary, September 2007
From U.S. History in Context
Listen

WITH THE Democratic party now on the march in American politics,

the issue of poverty has made a comeback. One of the first acts of
the new majority on Capitol Hill was to raise the minimum wage to
$7.25 an hour in order to help the "working poor," and a "living wage"
movement is making headway at the grass roots, pressuring states
and localities to pay even more to low-skilled workers. Congressman
Charles Rangel, the new chairman of the House Ways and Means
Committee, has declared poverty "a threat to national security," and
the committee recently held a hearing on the subject. Among the
advocates in attendance was John Podesta, a former aide to
President Clinton and now the head of the Center for American
Progress, who urged the lawmakers to spend $90 billion more a year
on various new benefits for low-income families.

As for the Democratic presidential contenders, John Edwards has

built his campaign around the idea that there are "two Americas," one
of them affluent and the other struggling to get by. Like Hillary Clinton
and Barack Obama, he has stressed the need to improve health-care
coverage, especially for low-paid workers who are not insured by their
employers. The Democrats obviously believe that poverty is an issue
with political traction.
Nor are partisans on the Left alone in their concern. The moderate
Brookings Institution has been busy publishing its own sober
assessments of poverty and inequality, and the Bush administration,
in the spirit of "compassionate conservatism," wants to spend more
on poor fathers and programs for ex-offenders leaving prison.
Yet despite the rhetoric and public gestures, there is a curious lack of
urgency about this new anti-poverty agenda. It has a grim, forced
quality about it, as if performed out of duty rather than optimism. The
price tag on the new proposals is big enough, yet they themselves
seem small-bore, a far cry from the grand designs and high hopes of
the original "war on poverty." In June, the New York Times Magazine
devoted an entire issue to inequality in America, with a somber John
Edwards posing on the cover. But as several of the articles
suggested, the roots of our income and wealth disparities are not well
understood, nor does anyone have clear solutions. With his recycled
ideas for wage subsidies and special savings accounts, Edwards
himself has little new to say on the subject.
We are thus left with a paradox. Many in Washington believe that
poverty deserves more attention, yet they approach the problem with
great caution. Gone is the confidence of the 1960's and, before that,
the New Deal. For the first time in generations, no one is bullish on

the idea that we can end poverty anytime soon.

FOR MOST of the 20th century (and especially in the wake of the
Great Depression), destitution in the U.S. was blamed on the failure
of the labor market. Poor adults were those who either could not find
jobs or were forced to work for very low pay. Critics on the Left saw
capitalism itself as the culprit: the free market, they said, benefited
owners rather than employees, whose toil was no guarantee that they
would be offered jobs or wages high enough to live on. And so
government had to intervene. In America as in Europe, reform
movements agitated for the power to organize unions, for economic
policies to maintain full employment, and for the establishment of
programs like Social Security to cushion workers against the loss of
income due to unemployment or retirement.
After World War II, such measures helped to lift the bulk of American
workers and their families into the middle class. Whenever the
economy was hot, as during the 1960's, wages rose and the poverty
level fell. From this viewpoint, the government needed only to ensure
that jobs were available and to "make work pay." Poverty was seen as
an affliction of the working class, and the assumption was that poor
adults would work whenever they could.
Unfortunately, the boom of the 1960's left behind a smaller and
largely nonworking poor population. In 1959, 68 percent of the heads
of poor families worked, 31 percent of them full-time and year-'round.
By 1975 those figures had fallen to 50 and 16 percent respectively,
and they have changed little since then. For the nonworking poor, a
hot economy was no solution. During the boom of the 1990's, poverty
fell much less than it had in the 1960's.

Liberal advocates like to suggest that most of the poor rely on

employment. A "working" family, they often say, is one in which
anyone earns any income at all over a year. In reality, though, the
nonworking poor far outnumber the working. Only 37 percent of poor
adults (sixteen and over) claimed any earnings at all in 2005, and just
11 percent of them worked full-time all year. This contrasts with
figures of 68 and 46 percent, respectively, for the general population.
Moreover, only 4 percent of the nonworking poor blame their idleness
on an inability to find work. More often they report that they are ill,
retired, in school, or taking care of families.
Still, the idea has persisted on the Left that the poor are really the
unemployed. In the 1970's, the activist-academics Francis Fox Piven
and Richard Cloward famously argued that welfare was really a
species of unemployment insurance--a way to buy off the working
class when jobs were scarce. The trouble with this view was that the
welfare rolls exploded precisely during the prosperous 1960's--that is,
during good times, not bad. The vast expansion of welfare in that era
was not a result of falling employment among the poor but a cause of
it. As even Marx realized, only those who labor can claim to be
exploited. By the 1980's, few poor adults were victims of the
economy--they largely stood outside it, not even looking for work.
As it became less plausible to blame American poverty on the labor
market, a second thesis emerged, this one concerning race. The poor
are disproportionately nonwhite. In 2005, a quarter of them were
black and a quarter Hispanic, percentages far above the share of
these groups in the general population. Moreover, of people who
remain poor over several years, a majority are nonwhite. Some argue,
accordingly, that the poor are kept out of work by racial discrimination.
A leading goal of the civil-rights reforms of the 1960's was to put a

stop to this bias.

The problem with this argument is that, for blacks in particular,
poverty in its most self-defeating form--marked by lower work levels
and higher rates of crime and substance abuse--emerged largely
after the civil-rights era rather than before it. Over the past several
decades, educated and employed blacks have gained enormously
from wider opportunities, moving up to higher wages and professional
jobs. But the steady advance of the black middle class has occurred
alongside worsening conditions for poor blacks. A fairer society, with
strong taboos against discrimination (and, indeed, racial preferences),
has not been enough to overcome poverty.
The leading explanation for this dismal trend, as Daniel Patrick
Moynihan first suggested more than 40 years ago, is the dissolution
of the black family. When Moynihan issued his famous report in 1965,
a quarter of black children were born out of wedlock. Today, that
figure is 68 percent. Stable marriage has virtually disappeared in poor
black areas, undercutting basic socialization. Even in the affluent
1990's, labor-force participation declined among younger black men.
Today, a third of these men have criminal records, and half are absent
fathers, with many of their children subsisting on welfare.
AS RACE became a less plausible explanation for poverty, many
academics and advocates searched for other "social barriers" on
which to pin the blame. After all, the poor were often isolated in ghetto
areas, where their children received inferior schooling and health
care. Welfare itself was a disincentive to work, since grants were
reduced when a mother had earnings. Above all, jobs seemed to be
disappearing from the inner city. There was said to be a "mismatch"
between low-skill workers there and the employment available to

them. Jobs appeared to be largely out of reach in the suburbs or to

require too much education.
But none of these theories held up, either. High skills are not
necessary to avoid poverty. Getting and keeping a job require only
personal discipline, as the success of many recent immigrants from
Asia and Latin America has demonstrated. But when the nonworking
poor were given training or education, it typically had little effect; the
programs did not cause clients to work more regularly than before.
Nor did improvements in incentives--that is, allowing recipients to
keep more of their public aid if they worked--raise the employment of
those on welfare. Even providing government-guaranteed jobs failed
to improve their situation, and for the same underlying reason: it did
little to alter the habits and attitudes that kept people from getting and
keeping jobs in the private economy, where work was already
available. Studies also showed that proximity to employment had at
best only a small effect on whether the poor worked.
Thus, by the 1990's, many politicians and policymakers had begun to
question the idea that poverty was caused by impediments that
government could remove. Indeed, some took the opposite view:
because of welfare, many of the poor had the option not to work, and
were therefore all too free. The solution was not to expand
opportunities but to enforce obligations. The poor would be required
to work, not just offered the chance to do so. The public strongly
supported this approach, and both parties endorsed it, although some
liberal Democrats dissented. Congressional Republicans crafted
radical welfare-reform legislation--the Personal Responsibility Act of
1996--and President Clinton signed it into law.
Most welfare experts predicted disaster. If the failures of the poor

were a result of external barriers, as they believed, conditioning public

aid on work would only throw poor families into the street. But reform
triumphed. With startling speed, millions of welfare recipients took
jobs. Work levels among poor single mothers soared. Between 1994
and the early 2000's, the welfare rolls plummeted by 60 percent. Child
poverty also fell, though less sharply.
The credit for this astonishing shift goes partly to the superb economy
of the late 1990's and to higher spending on child care and wage
subsidies. But the new work tests were what broke the mold. They
spurred welfare mothers to seek work more seriously than ever
before.
For social scientists and advocates, this outcome was a signal defeat.
It largely refuted the deterministic view of poverty that they had
devised. In their statistical models, adverse social conditions had
seemed to explain and excuse the failure of most poor people to
work. Yet, once government clearly demanded work and made it a
condition of aid, the poor responded. Deficient public authority--not a
lack of opportunity--had been the major cause of poverty.
EVEN WITH the stunning success of welfare reform, however,
poverty remains a problem in the U.S. The government defines
poverty in terms of low income, adjusted for family size. The poverty
line for a family of three, for example, was $15,735 in 2005 (the most
recent year for which we have data). That is a meager income by
American standards (though vastly above what counts as poverty in
developing countries). By this measure, about 13 percent of
Americans were poor in 2005.
But as many analysts have noted, these numbers overstate the real

extent of poverty. The current measure considers only pre-tax cash

income, excluding a range of government benefits like food stamps,
housing, and wage subsidies. Douglas Besharov of the American
Enterprise Institute has calculated that to include these other benefits
would reduce the poverty rate to 5 percent or less. It is also clear, to
judge by the level at which they consume, that many people counted
as poor underreport their income. Most possess color televisions and
VCR's, and nearly half own their own homes.
Considered strictly as a problem of income, the government might
well abolish poverty simply by giving money to the poor. The average
poor family in 2005 fell $8,125 below the poverty line. To lift all 7.7
million of those families up to the line would have cost $62 billion--a
substantial sum but less than what we now spend on anti-poverty
programs. This, in fact, is largely how Europe has dealt with the
problem: income transfers, with no questions asked. Many academics
who study poverty would like the U.S. to do the same.
But Americans have always put more stress on "deservingness." We
prefer to help people who have become needy due to circumstances,
not their own actions. In America, even liberals have adhered to that
tradition--by seeking reasons for poverty outside the poor themselves,
in the economy, racism, or other barriers. Today, as we have seen,
those theories are largely exhausted. Al-though impediments to
working may still affect some people, poverty is overwhelmingly a
result of dysfunctional patterns of life.
Families are poor in America in 2007 typically because unmarried
parents have children and then do not work regularly to support them.
Other social problems--crime, substance abuse, school failure--tend
to cluster in poor areas. Though much poverty is transient, an

underclass composed of the long-term poor overshadows American

cities. It is their self-defeating way of life, not just their low income,
that most people now associate with poverty. Welfare reform
succeeded chiefly by changing habits and attitudes, not by changing
society. It has become difficult to avoid the conclusion that serious
poverty in America is rooted in the culture of the poor.
THIS REALIZATION is one reason for the joyless character of the
current anti-poverty campaign. Another explanation is the lack of
political support from below. What is most striking about the current
effort is how detached it is from any substantial voting constituency.
Historically, efforts to uplift the downtrodden emerged from the
grassroots, where they won the active support of their potential
beneficiaries. One thinks of the unionists who followed Walter
Reuther in the 1930's, or the civil-rights activists who heeded Martin
Luther King, Jr.'s, call a generation later. E! 2s provided leadership, to
be sure, but the energy of these movements was local and popular.
Since the 1960's, liberals have struggled, without success, to develop
similar support for anti-poverty programs. They have had only
passing victories. The Community Action Program, innocently
enacted as part of the "war on poverty" in the 1960's, was seized on
by radicals in some cities to challenge municipal governments. In the
same era, a welfare-rights movement arose, mobilizing poor mothers
to stage protests at welfare offices in order to claim higher benefits.
But these outbursts did not last. Dependent on public largesse and
lacking sustained support in their own communities, they faded away
with the federal programs that had spawned them.
The great obstacle to a renewed radicalism, then as now, is that the

poor, unlike the followers of past social movements, simply lack the
organization and discipline needed to advance their own interests, or
even to support candidates who might speak for them. This reflects
the same problems that make for poverty in the first place. Society
among today's poor is profoundly disordered. Men live largely
detached from families, while women are distracted by single
motherhood. Young people are more oriented to the street than to
school. Above all, a lack of steady employment denies most poor
adults the standing they would need to have a serious influence in
politics.
True radicalism is largely the doing of the upwardly mobile and of
working men committed to supporting their families. The unionists
who followed Walter Reuther in the 1930's possessed, because of
their employment, the power to bring whole industries to a halt. Many
of the black civil-rights marchers of the 1960's were college students,
who then went on to enter the expanding black middle class. The
poor of today's inner city have nothing like the same capacities. They
are in fact a disorganized lumpenproletariat, for which Marx had only
scorn.
The only workers marching in American cities today are illegal
immigrants, fearful that they will be deported. Their demonstrations
might seem to represent a revival of the radical tradition, but without
legal status, the immigrants arouse as much opposition as support.
Having come here largely to do jobs that the native-born poor no
longer do, they actually dramatize what is amiss with poor people in
America. Only when American citizens again take those jobs, and
then take action, will politicians notice. Meanwhile, immigration has
only exacerbated the divisions and problems that make the poor
largely invisible in public life.

This silence from below has made the politics of poverty increasingly
elitist. In today's Washington, the poor are typically spoken for by
experts armed with statistics, or by advocates who are not
themselves poor. Sometimes an eloquent populist like John Edwards
will rally to the cause, trying to stir indignation in the electorate at
large. What one almost never sees, in front of the Ways and Means
Committee or anywhere else, is the poor speaking for themselves.
Even the living-wage movement is the work of better-off advocates
more than of the low-wage workers who would benefit from it.
TODAY'S ANTI-poverty crusaders, even on the Left, tacitly accept
that serious poverty in America has a cultural basis. This conclusion,
which would once have been denounced as "blaming the victim,"
accounts for the relative modesty and sobriety of the new anti-poverty
proposals. Despite recent successes, government has found no sure
way to get poor adults to work more steadily and avoid unwed
pregnancies. It is clear that changing these patterns of dysfunctional
behavior will take a long time. Analysts speak of "investing" in earlychildhood education and other programs so as to produce a slow
amelioration over generations.
Compared with the 1960's, partisan differences over the issue have
actually cooled considerably. A spirit of problem-solving now
dominates, especially at the state and local level. Through welfare
reform, officials have tried to craft a regime that expects and rewards
work and other constructive behaviors. Democrats will press for
higher spending on benefits, and may win their point. But they too
know that any new largesse must be linked to demands that the
recipients help themselves.
And welfare reform itself still needs reforming. When Congress

reauthorized the program last year, it remedied certain weaknesses in

the 1996 law, but it left others untouched. The most important change
would be to extend work requirements to more poor men. Because
they seldom receive welfare--a program mainly serving mothers with
children--they cannot be made to hold a job in return for it. But some
men are supposed to work as a condition of parole from prison, or
because they owe child support to their families. Those obligations
could be enforced more effectively, and programs to do this are in the
works.
Will extending the reach of welfare reform, with its long-overdue
emphasis on work and responsibility, transform the lives of the poor?
Certainly not in the short term. But the absence of easy answers
does not free us of the need to try. Society may not be to blame for
the plight of today's poor, as the Left has maintained. But we still have
an obligation to improve the lives of our least-fortunate citizens,
especially children born into broken, disordered families. For the poor,
the claims of justice are largely exhausted, but the claims of charity
remain.
LAWRENCE M. MEAD is professor of politics at New York University.
He is the author or editor of seven books on poverty and welfare
reform, including, most recently, Welfare Reform and Political Theory
(co-edited with Chris Beem). This article is based on a Bradley
lecture that he delivered at the American Enterprise Institute in
January.
Mead, Lawrence M

Minimal Wages

Commonweal, January 10, 2014

From U.S. History in Context
In a recent speech on economic inequality, President Barack Obama
drove home his argument for raising the national minimum age with a
quotation: "They who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the
people should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as
to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged." Karl Marx?
Franklin Delano Roosevelt? No: Adam Smith, described by the
president as the "the father of free-market economics." Not that FDR
would have disagreed with Smith. Before helping to establish the
nation's first minimum wage in 1938, FDR declared that "no business
which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its
workers has any right to continue in this country."
Today many businesses in this country depend, if not for their
existence, then for some of their profits on paying less than living
wages to their workers. The government keeps many of these
workers out of poverty by providing them with tax credits and public
assistance--in effect subsidizing their employers by making up for
inadequate wages. A full-time worker making the current minimum
wage ($7.25 an hour) earns just over $15,000 a year, almost 20
percent below the poverty line for a family of three. If such a family is
to be "tolerably well fed and lodged," they will need food stamps and
housing subsidies. Many of them, lacking employer-based health
insurance, will also qualify for Medicaid. From time to time, a big
company will unwittingly acknowledge that many of its own workers
don't make enough to meet basic needs. A Walmart in Canton, Ohio,
was recently embarrassed by reports that it had organized a
Thanksgiving food drive for its "associates."

It wasn't always this way. In 1968 the minimum wage was $10.65 an
hour in today's dollars. If it had kept up with inflation and gains in
labor productivity since then, it would now be $25 an hour. No one in
Washington supports raising the national minimum wage that high,
but Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) have
introduced legislation that would raise it to $10.10 and index it to
future increases in the cost of living--mak-ing the minimum wage not
only more fair, but also more predictable and less subject to political
exploitation. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that such
legislation would affect 30 million American workers.
Contrary to popular misconceptions nourished by some in the media,
most of the low-wage workers who would benefit from a higher
minimum wage are not teenagers earning a little pocket money and
learning some basic job skills. More than 90 percent of them are
adults and almost a third are parents. The federal government spends
around $7 billion a year on public assistance just for the families of
fast-food workers. If conservative lawmakers are serious about
streamlining entitlement programs and promoting self-reliance, they
should be lining up behind proposals to raise the minimum wage.
So why aren't they? It isn't for lack of public support. A large majority
of voters from both parties are in favor of raising the minimum wage.
Whatever their opinions about welfare, most Americans agree with
Adam Smith that those who work for a living should actually make
one. Opponents of a higher minimum wage say it will only hurt the
poor by reducing the number of jobs: when labor costs are higher,
they warn, employers will hire fewer workers. This argument has a
certain intuitive force, but several recent studies suggest that modest
minimum-wage increases have no significant effect on employment
levels. Lobbyists for retailers and fast-food restaurants also argue that

higher wages will drive up business costs, which will be passed along
to consumers as higher prices. But research suggests that a $10.10
minimum wage would add only a few pennies to the price of a
hamburger. The lobbyists don't mention that the big corporations they
represent could also absorb some of the higher labor costs by
accepting lower profit margins. Some of what a McDonald's franchise
owner pays in higher wages, for example, ought to come out of the
fee he has to pay to the McDonald's Corporation, which made $5.5
billion in profit in 2012.
A higher minimum wage would be good for the nation's economy. It
would stimulate demand by giving low-wage workers more spending
power. It would save Washington and the states billions of dollars on
entitlement programs by reducing poverty. But the argument for
raising the minimum wage is as much moral as economic; it is an
argument about fairness and the dignity of labor. No one who works
full time in the richest country in the world should need to supplement
her income with handouts, public or private. Or as the president put it
in his speech, "If you work hard, you should make a decent living."
Adam Smith couldn't have said it better.

1. "Going it alone." Commonweal 141.7 (2014): 5. U.S. History in

Context. Web. 1 Feb. 2015.
2. Minimal Wages." Commonweal 141.1 (2014): 5. U.S. History in
Context. Web. 1 Feb. 2015