During the Mayoral Forums, something TenHaken said resonated with me. When asked to look back on 8 years as mayor, what would he like to see as accomplishments. Paul said that he wanted to close The Bishop Dudley, The Banquet and Feeding South Dakota. He essentially wanted to ‘put them out of business’ because they wouldn’t be needed anymore.
Loetscher expressed similar goals early in her campaign when she had a FB discussion with a homeless advocate from Houston who is making big gains in ending homelessness there.
Whether Loetscher or TenHaken understand what kind of monumental task that will be, I don’t know. But it is possible and should be attainable.
It often frustrates me when I see ribbon cuttings and press conferences about expanding different facilities. I often scratch my head when I see local businesses giving to these organizations than some of these same businesses paying such low wages their own employees must use the facilities. Seems counterproductive.
As I have said in the past, we don’t have a housing or even a hunger issue in Sioux Falls, we have a wage issue.
There’s social fallout everywhere. A city who tries to close privately funded help centers is the worst kind of human rights violation. Famously, Huether assaulted people without repercussion. You must ask yourself, if an indigent person freezes to death beside a police station (this winter), can you be proud of living here. Walk outside Carnegie Hall, there’s more stomachs growling than Public Comment inside.
At the KSFY debate, PTH talked about how his business had to raise wages rather significantly in order to retain its employees because of a new tech company which had come into town. I was encouraged by that comment, but he needs to challenge the business community as a whole to do that whether they have new competitors in their field or not.
One of the things that bothered me about both PTH and Jo’s campaigns was that they kept talking about bring in high paying jobs, but then they would prefix this goal with discussions of attracting biotech and computer security firms to our town. But such an attraction only brings higher paying jobs to a specifically trained group and or outsiders who would then move to Sioux Falls. Such a strategy does not really offer any potential to raise wages for the rest of the citizens in town, who are not in biotech and computer security vocations.
We need a mayor and council, who will take the “Bully Pulpit,” when it comes to wages by challenging the business community to raise wages!…. Its time to end the wage collusion in this town and don’t tell me that it doesn’t exist here right now…. Because it does….
I find it interesting how little poverty there is in the major cities where the minimum wage has been raised to $15/hour- just kidding of course, poverty is growing in those places
we already have a biotech company here in town. they pickup dog shit.
Matt,
Maybe we should just cut wages, huh? That way poverty will become the norm for most and we’ll all be in the same boat feeding each other….
VSG- maybe you were a product of one of those school systems that pays much higher wages because they work so well also- poverty has been among us forever, there are many reasons and no simple solutions, but promising everyone “a living wage” without expectations for output is not the answer
MJ,
Yep, there will always be some poverty, but don’t use that as an excuse to not do better as a society.
And as far as your “living wage” comment, well, we should expect it from the employer. Else, the business plan is a fraud and not a capitalistic entity, rather a predatory game plan dependent upon the social welfare safety net to bail it out and keep it going….
vsg- so if I am thinking about starting a business- say picking up dog poop- I shouldn’t even think about it unless I can pay people a living wage to do it. So no jobs from this prospective business.Individuals have to start somewhere; gain experience and skills. In the mean time I am glad that places like the Banquet exist- in fact it is one of a few places not relying on government money to accomplish its mission. Once again, having high minimum wages has not kept places like Seattle, Los angeles, Minneapolis, DC, etc from having poverty. That clearly can’t be the fault of employers as they are paying the required high wages. It would be great to think that we don’t need places like the Banquet-= but we are always going to have the mentally ill, physically challenged, addicted and slackers who rely on their services.
Matt, remember this every time you don’t think employers, especially large corporations need to pay living wages, as of September 2017 the richest 1% of families controlled a record-high 38.6% of the country’s wealth in 2016, according to a Federal Reserve report published on Wednesday.
That’s nearly twice as much as the bottom 90%, which has seen its slice of the pie continue to shrink.
The bottom 90% of families now hold just 22.8% of the wealth, down from about one-third in 1989 when the Fed started tracking this measure.
Matt, I would never start a business personally if I could not offer a living wage with health benefits to my prospective employees.
Definitely lower wages is not the answer to your concerns, however. The reason poverty still exists in those towns you mention is because those in poverty don’t have jobs. And they don’t have jobs for many reasons like education, mental health, and physical challenges.
Lets not bring everyone down with lower wages, rather lets left people with wages so that we can have a better distribution of income and idealism as a society to address issues like education, mental health, and physical disabilities so that we can empower even more and help others get out of poverty.
High wages is an empowerment with the potential to strength the middle class so that as a society better and more capable and positive decisions can be made because of an enhanced distribution of income for all…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/05/04/whats-wrong-here-unemployment-is-below-4-percent-but-wage-growth-is-still-lousy/?utm_term=.65f23bb7cd5e
AS to mental health and physical disabilities, I covered that. Those people will most always be poor- so it is agreed we cannot eradicate poverty. Next, you can not blame employers paying the mandated high wages for poverty then, as they are paying what you have decided is fair. Next, if you can’t have a business paying lower wages then we are going to have a lot of companies go out of business or not have new ones start in the future.
So Matt, you think a failed business plan from day one, which is totally dependent upon the social welfare safety net from day one to survive is a good thing and very capitalistic in nature?