Liberal: We need to raise minimum wage to $15.00 an hour.
Conservative: that will increase the cost of our products and services.
Liberal: You won't notice the fifteen cent increase in your big-mac combo!
Conservative: We need to remove illegals and allow Americans to do those jobs.
Liberal: Do you know how much more you will pay for fruits and Veggies if we did that??
I don't know what boat you think I came in on, but anybody that would pay an electrician or plumber $100.00 an hour is a complete idiot, even where the Massholes live.
I was born into a construction family. When I was a child, my father paid me one dollar an hour to help him do side jobs. I carried clamps of bricks to the job site, mixed cement by hand, climbed up scaffolding two and three stories high with material my father needed, carried 8" and 12" block to the job site. And the end of the night, I would come home full of sand and cement in my clothing and hair. I would try to collapse on the bed for ten minutes (hoping my mother wouldn't see me) before I hit the showers and went to bed.
Trust me, as child, I wish I could have had a job picking strawberries. It sure as hell would have been a lot easier than being a bricklayer's laborer. My father was no easy boss to work for.
Of course when I was younger, social programs didn't pay very much. If you didn't get a job or attend college, parents back then kicked you out of the house at the age of 18. It was either work or starve.
But today, people live with their parents well into their 30's and beyond. Social programs pay almost as much as having a full-time job when you consider you don't pay taxes on benefits. Having two jobs to make ends meet? Forget about it. However when I was younger, me and most of my friends always had two jobs, or jobs that worked six to seven days a week.
But the solution to our problems is bringing in immigrants to do the jobs Americans won't do.
I agree, that is the solution, and agree with much of what you said...
Oh, and to clarify, I was saying you pay for a plumber to come to your house or electrician, a hundred bucks an hour....that's a fact, and that was 10 years ago when we were getting our house there ready to put up for sale, before moving here...the worker did not get all of that money, even if it was his own Plumbing company, he's gotta pay his receptionist or book keeper etc etc....or if he worked for someone else's business he probably got a third to half of that $100 an hour depending on the size of the company he worked for....here in my area of Maine you pay $60- $75 an hour for an electrician or Plumber and most of them are a company of 1, and maybe their wife is their receptionist and book keeper....so, in a way, they make more, with lower overhead, and no union dues like in Massachusetts....
It's one thing busting your butt as a kid working for your dad and having a home and family to come home to, with dinner served, roof over head and shower....
A lot of the youth and young adults that are unemployed, (and even employed as you mentioned), live near rural areas, with their families....leaving home to go and work hundreds of miles away, where all you can see is farm land, just ain't gonna happen.... it takes a lot of money to move out on your own, even if you have a roommate, and $12.50 an hour just doesn't cut it....especially having to move so far away from family and friends and ones support system....
But not everyone even eats at a McDonalds, and dept stores are so shy on employing workers now a days, you are lucky if you can at least find someone to ring up your sale, restaurants are understaffed too for the most part, and not everyone eats out....so raising the minimum for a few million workers, mostly restaurant workers, across the U.S. probably won't affect much...
BUT darn near everyone, buys fresh groceries for their daily meals and in my house, since we own our home and no mortgage or car payments, groceries is our largest monthly bill...and if you eat healthy and well, it ain't cheap, (especially if your husband is 6ft 3'' and can eat you out of house and home)...... near everyone will be affected....and I'm ok with that....I'd be willing to pay more, for American workers, but not everyone would be in the same position as I am... plus it would make it a lot harder for small farmers to sell their product to other countries around the world, with their prices higher....
so, bringing in workers on visas to do this work is probably the solution, but we probably need to up those quotas?