Sorry, I won't stop talking about the minimum wage.

There have been a few (troll) diaries lately about the minimum wage. They all (don't) cite a lot of sources. Their sources are very (un)reliable and (un)knowledgeable.

I don't like being told what to do, so I hate diaries with titles such as "Please stop talking about the minimum wage," especially when they're trolly titles like that one. That also offends me on a personal level, because I've lived under the poverty line pretty much my whole life and I know what it's like to be part of a family that earns minimum wage (read: shitty).

I'm not an economist - far from it - but I know of a darn good reason why we should raise the minimum wage, and I'm going to lay it out for you hypothetically.

Say you're a single parent of two. You work at the local grocery store (or corporate retail chain or whatever) for the federal minimum wage, which is $5.15 an hour (assume you're in one of the states where the MW is the same as the federal rate - see this map. Let's say Arkansas, because of what I'm going to discuss later.

At 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, that comes to a whopping $10,712 per year - before taxes (although you'd likely get back what you paid in), Social Security, health insurance (if you have it), unpaid sick days, etc.

Maybe you also get a couple thousand dollars a year in child support. $4,200, let's say. That makes your total income $14,912.

One of your kids is 3 years old, the other one is 7. The 3-year-old needs to go to daycare during the day, the 7-year-old during the summer. According to this, the average cost for the 3-year-old in Little Rock is $302 a week. We'll say it's $250 for the older one. That's a total of... holy shit, $18,704. How the hell did my mom ever afford for me to go to daycare?!

Well, the buck stops there, folks. This diary was honestly going to be a whole lot longer, and include the cost of a car and gas to get to work, then rent, food, etc. Even if you can get financial assistance for many of these things, it likely still wouldn't be enough.

I'd imagine that people against wage increases aren't too happy with the idea of welfare, either. Well, if you don't pay people enough to get by, how can you expect them to want to work?

Last year, I interviewed someone from a social services program for an article I was writing. She worked with families to help them become more self-sufficient. Something she said really stuck with me: "Once they pay for gas and childcare, it's almost not worth it." People will stay home, collect welfare and not work if it's going to be more profitable than working for minimum wage. There's your fucking economics.

So I really don't want to hear it anymore about how raising the minimum wage would hurt people. It certainly wouldn't have hurt me and my mom. I can't believe people are letting right-wing nutjobs get away with this kind of absurd, bullshit "dialogue" on the minimum wage. It must be raised if we want to do anything about reducing poverty. That's just how it is.