Figure costs from bottom up

Bodhi Densmore (“Minimum wage no answer,” Letters, Jan. 4) sounds like a “That’s all the job is worth,” Reagan Republican.

Productivity is an abstract term with no standard of measurement, accounting or price. Just who are so unskilled or lacking ability they can’t flip burgers, make pizza or wash dishes for $8.55 per hour? A wage roughly half the purchasing power of the dollar-per-hour minimum wage of the 1960s.

The cause of the poverty cycle is calculating costs from the top down: “trickle-down economics.” We once had a system that calculated costs from the bottom up. It was parity introduced in World War II which brought us out of that war a creditor nation with the world’s strongest economy. Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson of the Eisenhower administration killed parity; we’ve been borrowing our way to prosperity ever since.

Business principles are not economic principles; the shortage of earned income goes full circle. For every dollar robbed from labor (who is the consumer), five dollars of trade turn is lost and one dollar of profit is lost.

Swede Little

Mullan, Idaho