Fording the Wage Gap

In an America where the average cost of living for an average family is near to $60,000 a year (http://cost-of-living.findthedata.org/l/615/National-Average), we are staggeringly still paying $7.25 an hour minimum, which results in $15,080 a year individual income ASSUMING one can find full-time employ in this turbulent job market (http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-annual-earnings-full-time-minimum-wage-worker). That is to say, a dual-income family, with both wage earners employed full time, will pull just over $30,000 a year. That is HALF WAY to the poverty threshold. And that is in the rosiest of possible minimum wage earning situations, which is for many absolutely not the case. Meanwhile, corporate America is fighting the idea of raising the minimum to a living wage tooth and nail. Personally, I find this refusal astonishingly myopic. After all, until we decide we are okay with rampant starvation and homelessness in America, the under employed, unemployed, and underpaid must seek out taxpayer assistance simply to live. And yet, as Michael Moore points out, a hundred years ago, one of the most venerable architects of American industry,  Henry Ford, paid the adjusted-for-inflation equivalent of $15 and hour. This was based on the simple idea that not only should a worker be able to LIVE on his or her wages, but should be able to afford the product they are in fact working to build. It is a head-hanging shame that "in a country about eight times as rich per person" as Ford's day, we see full-time employed people in a welfare line. Henry Ford understood that reinvestment into the working class fuels the furnace of capitalism, by diversifying one's customer base. When one considers the lamentations from the right at the deplorable welfare state, one wonders how those same voices decry making it possible for vast swaths of Americans to WORK for a LIVING wage rather than work for half a living and ask for taxpayer dividends to close the income gap. As a student, working part time and in school full time, this issue hits home particularly. Part-time supplemental jobs rarely come at much above the minimum wage, and without the cushion of family help and financial aid, I personally would not be in a position to live with anything resembling comfort. In looking to our future, maybe it's time America started thinking like Henry did, a hundred years in the past.