Minimum Wage Slacking Off On Duties, Policy Group Discovers

We like this story in the N.Y. Times. It's a discussion about low wage employment. But better than just producing another profile of people down on their luck, it highlights the public policy work of a group called Wider Opportunities for Women. Through their work they are attempting to redefine how we calculate poverty.

What the group does is extend the marker of sustainable income in a manner that takes into account the societal (and capitalistic) goal of people being able to improve their lives via work. Where the tendency is to set some government level "rate of poverty," or "minimum wage," the BEST index developed by WOW takes into account the little things that would raise a family into the middle class and keep them there: having emergency funds, money for retirement, money for the kid's education.

The study, commissioned by Wider Opportunities for Women, a nonprofit group, builds on an analysis the group and some state and local partners have been conducting since 1995 on how much income it takes to meet basic needs without relying on public subsidies. The new study aims to set thresholds for economic stability rather than mere survival, and takes into account saving for retirement and emergencies.

(N.Y. Times)

One might imagine that changes like this would be the type of thing that anyone could get behind  regardless of political persuasion (save for Libertarians who follow "clock winds itself policy theory"). Then again, if you are being demagogued into not reading supposed left leaning rags like the Times and other main stream media, you are unlikely to really give the ideas presented here a good mental rendering. It's too bad.