RSS"Middle-Class Life", Indeed
August 18th, 2006 | View Comments
I was making my morning blog rounds and came upon this post on Dan Drezner. He quotes the New York Times quoting Joe Biden saying,
“My problem with Wal-Mart is that I don’t see any indication that they care about the fate of middle-class people,” Mr. Biden said, standing on the sweltering rooftop of the State Historical Society building here. “They talk about paying them $10 an hour. That’s true. How can you live a middle-class life on that?”
As a commenter on Dan Drezner noted, this strikes me as “extremely odd”. No, forget odd. I’m going to go with “ridiculous”.
Your average grad student in this country makes about $15,000 annually. Assuming a 40-hour work week (during rough semesters, grad students easily work double that), this translates to less than $8/hr pre-tax. How can you live a middle-class life on that?
The answer is: you can’t. Many grad students can’t afford to live alone, can’t afford new furniture and have to buy $5 dressers off of Craig’s List, and can’t afford to own cars. No, it’s not glamorous, but if you budget and spend wisely, you’re probably not going to wind up starving and on the street. If you want a middle-class life, you either need to do the legwork and get yourself more funding, or you need to quit grad school and find a job.
Grad students do come out ahead of your typical Wal-Mart employees in the end because we have more education to start with, get some form of health coverage, even if it’s just free checkups at the student health clinic, and, depending on the field, the PhD could land you a hefty salary upon graduation.
I mean, I’m a liberal and I believe in providing a basic standard of living, and I understand the social and institutional problems that reduce upward mobility, and that corporate greed and corruption are big problems, and I’m all for providing the kind of training and education that can enable people to haul themselves up by their own bootstraps.
But the cold, hard reality is that there is a limited amount of money in the world, and a limited number of houses with white picket fences, and not everybody can wind up with a pile of the former and one of the latter. The particular skills you bring to the table do and should matter in this game of life. There are lots of ways Wal-Mart could do better by their workers, but I think expecting them to pay a middle-class salary to their lowest-skilled workers is asking a bit much.
Yvonne posted this on August 18th, 2006 @ 12:00pm in Graduate School, Life, News/Politics | Permalink to ""Middle-Class Life", Indeed"
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1. Elenita » August 19th, 2006 at 5:15 am
I suspect that this is less a political issue than a political culture issue, if that makes any sense. Because Americans–as a rule–believe so strongly in the myth-slash-political-institution that is The Middle Class, no one in or running for elected office will actually come out and say that “decent Americans” anywhere “should / will / other verb tense here” ever live at less than middle-class standards.
Do we hear otherwise from our government officials? Sure–but they’re probably technocrats and not elected. Besides, technocrats (usually) deal with data and numbers and facts and other things conveniently complicated (and boring). Politicians try to sell dreams in sound bites, which is usually a whole different and frequently incompatible thing.
Anyway, I had a point here somewhere, but since I haven’t managed to stay asleep tonight and I’m wandering around the web at 5:15am on a Saturday, my brain offers the alternative closing note: you should never run for elective office, sis. Nor me.