This applies very little to me.

In the meantime, we have to realize that the people who clean our homes, serve our meals, or clean up after us while earning wages that ensure they stay trapped in the cycle of poverty are the true heroes in our country.

I clean my own home, I make my own meals including the ones I eat at work, I do my own laundry and mow my own grass. Someone does have to put the products I buy on the store shelves and sometimes I have to have a cashier check me out but that sentence does not really ring true to me. At work we have a janitor but it is a NASA facility (I work for a startup that rents space from NASA) so I expect the janitor and the other workers that keep the facility running make wages that don’t trap them in poverty.

Beginning January 1, 2019, federal contractors must pay covered workers at least $10.60 per hour.

Maybe it is there but I don’t see it. I don’t see a conspiracy to keep the poor poor. I don’t mean that there isn’t a segment that revels in their superiority over the poor. I mean that I don’t think the rich are deliberately oppressing the poor. I think for the rich it is just a byproduct of controlling costs. When you are competing on price you cut costs wherever you can. When the customer wants the lowest price and does not really care what you have to do to give them that lowest price, who is more to blame the producer, seller or buyer? The minimum wage needs to be set locally to as high a value as will not make things worse. You don’t want to drive up prices too much and you don’t want to drive away jobs. Some places but not every place $15 per hour could be tolerated. Oh, the whole tipped wage thing need to go away.

If prices rise, who suffers the most, the poor, the middle class or the rich?

TEK