Dear Editor,
In last week’s paper Dr. John Deskins, director of WVU’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research, was quoted in an article about “labor force participation” in West Virginia. Statistics show, according to Dr. Deskins, that not enough people in WV want to work and that “we are never going to achieve prosperity that we hope for in West Virginia unless we can get more of our people in the workforce”.
No one who works at a $7.25 per hour federal, or $8.75 per hour WV minimum wage job is going to achieve prosperity. The same can be said for the vast majority of jobs listed with WorkForce West Virginia or that appear in the employment sections of the state’s newspapers.
West Virginians could make just enough money at those jobs to disqualify themselves and their families from monthly SNAP benefits (which amount to about a week’s worth of food) and their healthcare benefits through Medicaid.
Why would anyone do that? Does Dr. Deskins think West Virginians are stupid or crazy, or both? If we are, it’s not because we resist becoming wage slaves at dead-end jobs — it’s because we keep voting for the same politicians and political parties that have decimated the middle class in this country. Owning a home, sending your kids to college, buying a new car, having proper medical and dental care, taking a family vacation once a year, and so on, are becoming hopeless dreams for more and more Americans.
We have the best politicians money can buy and we’ve allowed them and their “economic experts” to ship our good paying jobs out of the country while opening our borders to endless immigrants that drive down wages and take the jobs that remain.
Every state and community will have some lazy bums and druggies. But when 45% of the population isn’t participating in the labor force it’s a failure of the system and that system’s so-called “leaders.”
People would rather have their free time and be broke than have full-time jobs and be broke anyway. No one wants to work and “achieve prosperity” for those who are already prosperous, while they and their families go without.
Until there’s some economic justice in this country and people can make a decent living wage, the response to calls for greater “labor force participation” will most likely continue to be “Count me out”.
Alan Balogh
Hillsboro
