This week Americans unexpectedly got bad economic news, weekly jobless claims jumped to 400,000 .You would think that as the current debates to pick the next potential president rage on, we ‘d hear some creative and effective ways to address this crisis. Well, they got the creative thing down…creatively bizarre.
Newt Gingrich decided to flex his urban planning and community development expertise by stating that the solution to the “inner city’s” lack of jobs is to do what successful people do. Start working at an early age doing small jobs like “shoveling snow. ” He also said that the solution to childhood poverty would be to “hire 30-some kids to work …for the price of one janitor… ”
We assume Newt knows what he is talking about, with all of his experience working in the inner city and all. But at 1Miami, when we tried to start a snow shoveling business for Miami kids, for some reason it wasn’t that successful. So we then thought about the “replacing 30 kids with1 janitor” idea for the big bank buildings in Miami’s downtown. We figured that they could afford it after the bailouts they received.
It turns out that’s not such a good idea either. According to government data, the average janitor in Miami Dade County barely makes minimum wage–less than $16,000 a year. After crunching the numbers, we found that replacing one of those hard-working janitors in those big banks downtown with 30 kids, like Gingrich wants, would put a whopping ten bucks in each kid’s pockets weekly. After paying for lunch and bus fare, that ten bucks would look more like ten cents. Not exactly a good economic development plan. Sorry Newt!
We had another idea. Remember those downtown Miami offices of the bailed out banks we mentioned? The bank CEO’s kept making millions after making our economy a mess, while the office janitors still get minimum wage to clean up. The CEO of Wells Fargo (Florida’s foreclosure king) for example, made $18 million in 2010. Incidentally, a janitor cleaning Wells Fargo’s Miami office also paid more of his income in taxes that year than the bank. If you replaced that one CEO with hard-working janitors, you could hire over 1100 just to clean Wells Fargo’s “mess!” Now that’s a job creation plan! What do you say Newt?
Also, nictoe that only poor children should be doing this? Is that one of his points or is that just implied? I wonder what modern marketing tactics and technology designed to suck away all your attention do to kids in modern America. Probably not as much as being poor, right Newt?There he goes again, thinking poor people actually prefer being poor and lazy to leading a normal, comfortable American life. They talk as if an unemployed wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to work in a well paying factory position, IF THE FREE MARKET DIDN’T SHIP THEM ALL OVERSEAS. They berate the poor as if they aren’t even Americans. Take a bath and go get a job??? You think it’s that easy??? Take note that they think WE should settle for two or three super shitty minimum wage jobs at 65 hours a week JUST TO SURVIVE, AND FUCKING BE GRATEFUL FOR IT. This guy played a huge role in enabling the destruction of the middle class, the manufacturing sector, and the empowerment of extraordinary greed which altered our country (oops, I mean the WHOLE PLANET)forever. Even if he does get the nomination, he’ll get torn to shreds in the race because of his past role in the followup to the worst decade America has seen since the motherfucking 1930′s. GODDAMMIT!!!!RANT COMPLETE–Sorry, saw Newt saying something stupid again and just had to vent…..again. That dude makes me red out all the time. More so lately.