Minimum wage blues

Being a college student gives you access to many things: a wide array of excellent research materials, helpful professors, other students with a focus in the same area to work with, unique cultural events – oh, and lest we forget the one so important it’s the only one advertised on T-shirts: parties and booze.

However, there is one thing the average college student doesn’t have much access to, and that’s a well-paying job.

There are work-study opportunities, local employers and the occasional internship (normally unpaid, of course), but there aren’t always a lot of jobs that pay much more than minimum wage.

That works for some students. Some of us only need to work for spending cash at the bar or gas money to go home on weekends.

But for those who have to actually pay their own way, it becomes much harder to find the time to work and attend school full-time successfully.

The average student graduates with enough debt as it is. The average debt for a bachelor’s degree has gone up more than 8 percent after accounting for inflation, and that was before IU’s recent 4.6 percent tuition hike.

As far as credit card debt, the average student graduates owing more than $3,000. Combined, the total average debt a student graduates with is nearly $30,000.

This means even after a student graduates, and (hopefully) moves on to the world of the more gainfully employed, they face nearly a year’s salary of debt to pay off before they even start.

A major factor in this is that since before most IU students were born, Republicans have worked for deregulation and praised the ideas of “Reaganomics” and the invisible hand of the marketplace.

What’s not to love about the good ol’ invisible hand shoveling dump trucks of money your way?

Nothing, as long as you’re on top.

Since the 1980s, the disparity between top-level and general employment pay has ballooned to a ratio much more than 400-to-one, including more than an 800-to-one ratio between CEO pay and minimum wage.

In addition, while criticizing the costs of wage hikes and living wages, CEOs have given themselves pay raises and bonuses that often equal more than 50 percent in a year.

Supply-side economics relies in part upon the idea of the “trickle-down” theory, which is the aptly named idea that the more tax breaks you give the rich, the more money (quite accurately) trickles down to the poor and middle class.

Following this model, those who have recently made billions on Wall Street will now be back to spending cash, which then pays the barely minimum wage salaries of the former middle class.

Congratulations, the system works.

In the words of David Cross, “I make minimum wage. They’d like to pay me less, yeah they would, but they can’t ... so I’m the winner.”