The debate on the minimum wage should just be the beginning of the discussion on how government can use a variety of tools to raise wages across the economy-- and the Maryland bill is a good example for other states.

I see that no one has commented, so I just say Bravo! to Maryland (regardless of how small a step) and also to Mr. Newman for pursuing the goals of working people in America. I do not think this will have any great affect outside of those small numbers in Md. but change is always incremental, isn't it?

With a Democratic Congress it is, perhaps, time for the Federal government to lead the way in addressing the plight of the working poor. I live in Texas and work in public education. I may lose my job this year to NCLB but that is only a skirmish in the war on the poor that has continued for many decades now.

Wages, in general, and a living wage, in particular, is an amorphous term that is easily whitewashed to mean voluntary labor demands or striking unions wanting more than they are entitled to, but in many cases, it actually refers to someone's living wage. In other words, there are some working people who are really dying form poverty.The number of working poor in mortal jeopardy may be few as a percentage, but how many more are struggling and a paycheck or two away from catastrophe?

I just say Bravo! to Maryland (regardless of how small a step) and also to Mr. Newman for pursuing the goals of working people in America.

And bravo to you too, Don.

Bloggers as a whole seem more taken with the "suffering middle class"(tm) than the working people that make up the majority of the population and have been abandoned by many Democrats.

Best, Terry

Don't underestimate how far government purchasing effects the broader economy. As government outsources more services to the private sector, such living wage laws have greater effect. State and local governments outsource $400 billion in goods and services, hardly chump change. Add in economic development money and you end up with some serious effects on the economy if you hold public money accountable for creating decent wages.

The middle class sustains the economy and is the bulk of the economy. Most of the working poor do a service or make a product purchased by the middle class. If the MC goes down, the poor are going to starve.

No doubt it would be tough on all the plumbers and carpenters and mechanics and and teachers and clerks and salespeople and gas station attendants and nurses and waiters and waitresses and all those people that do the work if management went bust.

The fantasy that everybody from CEO's to gas station attendants are middle class is the sort of trash talk that is beloved by conservatives and turned much of the Democratic Party into little more than an auxiliary of the Republicans.

Best, Terry

I grew up in the -- supposedly classless -- socialist Poland, so Terry's:
"The fantasy that everybody from CEO's to gas station attendants are middle class [...]"
is of great interest to me as are kozmik's mentions of the "working poor".

We did, in fact, have "dividing lines", but they mostly (though not exclusively) followed the level of education; they were, more-or-less, comparable to what, in US, is "white collar" and "blue collar" division. But, in a country where everyone (excepting the party leaders) was relatively poor and where everyone worked (or, at least, was employed), we didn't have "the working poor". And, obviously, we didn't have "middle class" (or lower class or upper class, for that matter), either.

So, could someone explain to me -- pretty please -- what y'all mean by those terms? They're not even the same as in Lenin, never mind Marx...

Well, actually, if you really wanted to lump people into the minimum number of classes, larger than one, it would have to be the hyper rich investor class and the everybody else class.

The top 2% controls over 50% of the wealth. So if you look at it that way it's the bottom 98% and the top 2% each having a 50% share in things.

You can guess which group is more concerned about egalitarianism and the health of the community, and which group lives in gated communities and could relocate globally in any event, even if the country was nuked.

I, and every working person I know, like an elementary school teacher, a starving artist, a bus driver, a software engineer, a physiscist, a baker, and a socially conscious stock broker, are pretty concerned about the general quality of life and prosperity of all working people, the non-working poor who need transitional help, and the infirmed, which we may all be someday.

For moral/spiritual/altruistic reasons, reciprocal altruism, and just common frickin sense.

So, could someone explain to me -- pretty please -- what y'all mean by those terms? They're not even the same as in Lenin, never mind Marx...

Jesse Jackson dubbed the DLC the "Democratic Leisure Class."

A bit lengthier but clearer would be Thorstein Veblen. I am too lazy to look up the quote but this perhaps will do as a reasonable facsimile:

If all the kings and queens, emperors and presidents and senators and parliamentarians and managers and supervisors and magnates should die tomorrow, it would all be quite regrettable but we would get along well enough. On the other hand if all the mechanics and doctors, the plumbers and carpenters, the scientists and technicians, the farmers and teachers should die tomorrow it would be disastrous.

The middle class has generally been management as opposed to nobility or super rich.

Doctors have not always been among the the very wealthy in income but obviously most people would not easily place them alongside fruit pickers in the working class.

If we use income as the new dividing line then all classic analysis begins to break down.

What Clinton's "suffering middle class"(tm) did was separate out lower paid workers and bunch them with the unemployed and homeless as unworthy of consideration. "Ending welfare as we know it" accomplished a decades-long wet dream of Republicans of shredding any semblance of a concern for those below the upper income levels while the "giant sucking sound" was inveighed against by a supposed moderate independent. The wealthy were taken care of and the poor were empowered to care for themselves. Any objection is class warfare.

History of the term "middle class" from Wikipedia:

The middle class in this article refers to people neither at the top nor at the bottom of a social hierarchy. The term "middle class" has a long history and has had many, sometimes contradictory, meanings. It was once defined by exception as an intermediate social class between the nobility and the peasantry of Europe. While the nobility owned the countryside, and the peasantry worked the countryside, a new bourgeoisie (literally "town-dwellers") arose around mercantile functions in the city. This had the result that the middle class were often the wealthiest stratum of society (whereas today many take the term to refer by definition to the only-moderately wealthy.)

Descending from this distinction, the phrase "middle class" came to be used in the United Kingdom during the Industrial Revolution to describe the professional and business class, as distinct from both the titled nobility and the landed gentry on the one hand and the agricultural and (increasingly) industrial laborers on the other.

Throughout the twentieth century, the titled nobility of the United Kingdom became less homogeneous. This was because of the increasingly eclectic background of new creations, most of which were politically driven by the so-called middle class, and the declining power of the House of Lords relative to the House of Commons after the Parliament Act 1911. So far as the hereditary element of class was concerned, the titled upper class became less numerous because of the near cessation of new hereditary creations after the Life Peerages Act 1958. This was coupled with the natural rate of extinction of existing hereditary titles and the near abolition of the hereditary element of the House of Lords at the end of the twentieth century. At this point, hereditary titles are in no way the key to being "upper class," although they do lend a distinctive panache within the upper class. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Tim Hames was able to write in The Times (on 9 October 2006): "In a world in which David Cameron, whose mother-in-law is Lady Astor, and George Osborne, the son of a baronet, can claim to be “upper middle class” and that claim passes without much challenge, the upper class has plainly been reduced to such a rump that it now consists exclusively of the Royal Family."

Best, Terry

"Middle Class--the working-class of persons who have no direct hand in the writing of their government's laws and who are not in poverty."

Bill Clinton, I presume. Or are you Harold Ford? :-)

The middle class has never been working class by any definition.

Karl Marx thought the middle class, deprived of power by nobility, would rise up to take power followed by the working class overthrowing the bourgeoisie to form a working class paradise.

Whatever fancy grabs you, the "suffering middle class"(tm) is not by any definition working class - except that of Bill Clinton and the DLC. Work is left to the lower classes that make up the bulk of the population. The lower classes also do war as cannon fodder.

Best, Terry