A meme for the terminally clueless:

[HughBeaumont]

Don't usually delve into the Wonka memes, but had to make this one for the "bumper sticker brilliant" . . . .

[Scuba]

1. Yep, $10.10 is a joke.

[tblue37]

2. And yet Arkansas Democrat mark Pryor feels pressured by his conservative

constituency to say that going to $10.10 is "too much, too fast."

[Scuba]

3. Prima facie evidence that the Democratic Party has been taken over by infiltrators.

[tblue37]

4. Or that they are such cowards that they are afraid to stand for anything, so they keep stupidly

moving right because they assume that is what will protect their sinecure, since that is all they really care about. They also want those campaign contributions--and they don't want moneybags types to bankroll opponents.

[jwirr]

5. Was talking with my grandchildren last night about the minimum wage. My grandson makes $10.25

an hour in full time job. His worry is that he will not get a raise and he will be right back where he started. I told him that companies used to give everyone a raise when the lowest paid worker's wages went up. He laughed and said good luck with that today.

His wife gets minimum wage and it will help her IF she doesn't get a raise that loses her things like food stamps and the raise is not as much as she got from food stamps. There is a lot of fear from workers that this is not really going to help them in the long run.

[HughBeaumont]

10. I mean, do we take that risk or use this fear as an excuse to do nothing at all?

This wage needs to be raised. It needed to be raised in 2000. 10.10 is not even a proper inflation correction. I don't even take seriously anyone who thinks 7.25 an hour is too much money in 2014 America. The notion is just preposterous.

[jwirr]

11. I did talk to them about putting money in the pocket of buyers to help fix the economy. And i agree

that it needs to be raised because wages have flat-lined since the 70s and prices have been raising all that time.

I do have a question though. What we call the poverty rate is unrealistic in the extreme. Shouldn't that also be changed to reflect the need for assistance? When was the last time it was adjusted to reflect reality?

[Spider Jerusalem]

6. Two things here:

1) why would someone with a college education be earning minimum wage? (Most people with degrees? They aren't in minimum wage jobs.)

2) why must everyone have a college degree to be "viable in today's workforce"? What sort of message does it send to denigrate manual trades like carpentry and plumbing and so on? A college educaton isn't a realistic goal for everyone, nor should it be.

There's some fundamentally flawed thinking and ugly elitism going on there.

[Chan790]

7. You're just wrong.

1. A full 25% of my close friends from college, 12 years out, have never consistently earned more than $10.10/hr.

2.) The local major plumber and electrician...the same company...no longer hires people to do either job without at least some college. Not trade school. College. Too many idiots educated by "Generic Trade School" who maim themselves due to being morons, then seek disability.

It's not elitism. It's reality. The reality is that the world does not work the way it does in some people's heads. People with college degrees do often end up locked in the minimum-wage carousel. Most "trade" employers now require college in addition to trade education...and they get it because there are enough people with a BA that are willing to go back and take a 12-18 month program to learn a trade and make more money, pushing the people with only trade education out of viable employment.

[sendero]

12. College..

.... cannot raise anyone's intelligence. Education and intelligence are not the same thing. I've known plenty of morons with Master's degrees, a college degree is much more a measure of persistence and work ethic than of intelligence.

Just so you know.

[Chan790]

13. I didn't say it wasn't the case.

I said the local major plumbing companies will not hire an electrician or plumber without 15 credit-hours of college because they've gotten burned too many times, so to speak, on trade-school graduates that had the intellects of turnips...and given a choice of the guy with a BA and trade school or the guy with a HS diploma and trade school...they hire the second.

e.g. Trade careers like the ones SJ is advocating, at least locally, require college.

[HughBeaumont]

9. I agree on both counts. However, this isn't Germany we live in.

It's 2014 America, where corporations dictate all the rules and we have no choice but to follow them. It's utterly silly that you need a piece of paper for pretty much every occupation walking (despite what Yahoo tells us). I think the tragedy of degreed individuals (especially PhDs) working in low-paying service positions was brought up in a long DU thread a few months back; degreed professionals earning $12-$14 an hour, sorry to say, is one of laissez-faire capitalism's greatest FAILURES and DISGRACES.

The meme speaks to the RW "Minimum skills, minimum pay" cretins on the internets that believe $10.10 is some extravagant hourly amount when really, it's not even a proper inflation correction from our ridiculously inadequate minimum wage. It addresses the morons that still live in 1991 and apply 1991 cost-of-college/minimum wage ratios to 2014; oh, and that's WITHOUT factoring in their normal cost of living expenses.

[Rex]

8. Ouch!

That's going to hurt some feelings!

[CFLDem]

14. What about grants and scholarships?

And (shudder) loans?

And yes anything under $16 is a complete joke. Hell anything under $30 is barely middle class (real middle class not what people call middle class to make themselves feel better).

[HughBeaumont]

15. Grants are only available to people who are damned near starvation.

Scholarships aren't available to everyone and often times they don't even begin to cover the runaway costs.

Loans . . . well, that's exactly the problem highlighted in the meme. Long term, loans cost the borrower more than his/her potential salary's monthly ability to pay when cost of living is factored in (notice I said "potential&quot . Seen the job "growth" in the last 13 years? What about inflation-adjusted wages? Pathetic on both counts. In the long run, the ROI just isn't there. You'd be better off just paying cash as you go, which is an impossibility @ 10.10 an hour.

I'm struggling to pay for a kid's college costs now. Just imagine if (God Forbid) either one of us had to go back to school. It's not even in the realm of reality, and I'm not exactly a pauper. I can't even imagine how someone's supposed to "supersize their skill set" making minimum wage . . . maybe that was possible in 1991, but certainly not now.

[chrisa]

16. The yearly tuition for most colleges is more than someone at 10.10/hour, working 40 hrs / week, 52

weeks/year, would make in a perfect world where there were no other expenses.

[Orrex]

17. As memes go. that's not a bumper sticker; it's a dissertation

Brevity is the soul of wit, after all.

[HughBeaumont]

18. Bumper stickers are the snake oil of Luntz.

I'm not dumbing things down so an illiterate conservative can catch up. The people over at News Corp have that market cornered.

[Orrex]

19. Still, it's in your interest to convey the sentiment clearly

Nothing wrong with long-format pieces, but Wonkamemes are optimized for shorter sentiments, especially when trying to blow the minds of the bumper sticker crowd.

Additionally, the wording of this particular meme is rather clumsy and could do with an edit.

Not bad as a first draft, though.