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posted by n1 on Thursday June 05 2014, @11:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the will-code-for-gold dept.

The NYT reports that in a unanimous vote, the Seattle City Council went where no big-city lawmakers have gone before, raising the local minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than double the federal minimum, and pushing Seattle to the forefront of urban efforts to address income inequality. "Even before the Great Recession a lot of us have started to have doubt and concern about the basic economic promise that underpins economic life in the United States," says Council Member Sally J. Clark. "Today Seattle answers that challenge." High-tech, fast-growing Seattle, population 634,535, is home to Amazon.com, Zillow, and Starbucks. It also has more than 100,000 workers whose incomes are insufficient to support their families, according to city figures and around 14% of Seattle's population lives below the poverty level. Some business owners have questioned the proposal saying that the city's booming economy is creating an illusion of permanence. "We're living in this bubble of Amazon, but that's not going to go on," says businessman Tom Douglas. "There's going to be some terrific price inflation."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday June 05 2014, @04:29PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday June 05 2014, @04:29PM (#51779)

    Well, its kind of off-topic...

    Obamacare is bad because the only way to start fixing the US system is to learn from elsewhere:
    1) go single-payer and remove the excessively costly insurance complexities. My doctors all have to hire one or two persons just to deal with insurances, guess who pays?
    2) get rid of the lawyers, who make the malpractice insurance cost so high everyone pays more. Establish an indemnity and doctor punishment system that doesn't involve stupid jurors (hi, everybody, you're just collectively dumb)
    3) force schools to only charge a small tuition to remain accredited. Many MDs start their careers with quarter-million dollar debts. Guess who pays higher fees? MD is a difficult highly qualified job with long studies. They should be paid well. But it is, a lot more so than the terrorism BS, in the supreme interest of the nation to have MDs cost less. Subsidizing their education rather than loading them with debt is a way to help keep them from charging insane prices from day one.

    But Obamacare doesn't even start addressing these. It's a band-aid at the edge of the wooden leg, helping for a little while.
    In 10 to 30 years, the situation will be critical again, because the real problems are not addressed.

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