Thursday, April 06, 2006
Fun With Math and Poverty
Or, further proof that John McCain really has no fucking clue how America works.
At a speech in front of the AFL-CIO, McCain busted out the following reasoning behind his illegal immigration proposal:
But he took more questions, including a pointed one on his immigration plan.
McCain responded by saying immigrants were taking jobs nobody else wanted. He offered anybody in the crowd $50 an hour to pick lettuce in Arizona.
Shouts of protest rose from the crowd, with some accepting McCain's job offer.
"I'll take it!" one man shouted.
McCain insisted none of them would do such menial labor for a complete season. "You can't do it, my friends."
Let's see: assuming that conditions haven't changed much since Frontline's 1990 piece "New Harvest, Old Shame" (and really, have they?), the average migrant worker works a day stretching anywhere between 10 to 12 hours. Why don't we go for 10, since that's more reasonable. At $50 per hour, this would equal $500 a day, $2500 a week, and $10,000 a month. Let's say that a migrant family is only able to make three "seasons" a year. That is still $30,000 a year. And this is only for one person working, which is obviously not how migrant families work. Usually, many members are working at the same crop, bringing in multiple sources of income. With three people working in the fields (let's say mother, father, and oldest son), that's about $90,000 per year-- enough to make many "well off" families salivate.
And yet, migrant workers don't get $50 per hour. They get cents- dollars, if they're lucky- for every bucket of crops harvested. A family of three can just barely subsist on the migrant lifestyle, getting enough to not be starving in the streets but not to match up with any concept of the American dream we have. If we did offer $50 per year to migrant workers, things would be a lot fucking better in this country.
McCain has no fucking idea what people will do for money in this country. "You couldn't do it"? Fuck, if there was a chance for me to take a summer job that paid $50 per hour, you can bet I'd do everything I could to get it. How can we have any sort of change for people who can't even get by on minimum wage when our candidates don't think people will take jobs in manual labor that pay annual salaries equal to those earned by people in middle management?
At a speech in front of the AFL-CIO, McCain busted out the following reasoning behind his illegal immigration proposal:
But he took more questions, including a pointed one on his immigration plan.
McCain responded by saying immigrants were taking jobs nobody else wanted. He offered anybody in the crowd $50 an hour to pick lettuce in Arizona.
Shouts of protest rose from the crowd, with some accepting McCain's job offer.
"I'll take it!" one man shouted.
McCain insisted none of them would do such menial labor for a complete season. "You can't do it, my friends."
Let's see: assuming that conditions haven't changed much since Frontline's 1990 piece "New Harvest, Old Shame" (and really, have they?), the average migrant worker works a day stretching anywhere between 10 to 12 hours. Why don't we go for 10, since that's more reasonable. At $50 per hour, this would equal $500 a day, $2500 a week, and $10,000 a month. Let's say that a migrant family is only able to make three "seasons" a year. That is still $30,000 a year. And this is only for one person working, which is obviously not how migrant families work. Usually, many members are working at the same crop, bringing in multiple sources of income. With three people working in the fields (let's say mother, father, and oldest son), that's about $90,000 per year-- enough to make many "well off" families salivate.
And yet, migrant workers don't get $50 per hour. They get cents- dollars, if they're lucky- for every bucket of crops harvested. A family of three can just barely subsist on the migrant lifestyle, getting enough to not be starving in the streets but not to match up with any concept of the American dream we have. If we did offer $50 per year to migrant workers, things would be a lot fucking better in this country.
McCain has no fucking idea what people will do for money in this country. "You couldn't do it"? Fuck, if there was a chance for me to take a summer job that paid $50 per hour, you can bet I'd do everything I could to get it. How can we have any sort of change for people who can't even get by on minimum wage when our candidates don't think people will take jobs in manual labor that pay annual salaries equal to those earned by people in middle management?
