the Scott Stein

I was called today by a group named Working America and asked by a recording to participate in a one-question poll. The recording informed me that Congress had given itself many pay raises in the last ten years but had not raised the minimum wage, and made it clear that this was unfair to working families. The voice actress was certainly the sort you hear on political commercials. I think maybe somber music played in the background. The poll question was: Did I support an increase in the minimum wage?

After the call I googled Working America and learned that it is "A Community Affiliate of the AFL-CIO." So when you read in a newspaper that the AFL-CIO says x percent of people polled are in favor of increasing the minimum wage, see if the story mentions that the poll question set-up is designed to make the respondent feel like a greedy, uncaring lout if he answers "no."

The set-up to the question could point out that Congress raising its own salary at the taxpayers' expense has no relation to the minimum wage, since the workers in question are not getting a raise at the taxpayers' expense, but at the expense of businesses that employ them, which means at the expense of the businesses' investors and customers, which means at the workers' own expense, since some of them will be fired to keep investors and customers from having to shoulder the expense of giving them a wage that their productivity doesn't merit. Congress, on the other hand, doesn't get fired. Incumbents get re-elected almost as a matter of course. And even if a pay increase angers voters and they vote out an incumbent, someone new is voted in and the total number of Congress-people is unchanged. The same cannot be said for minimum-wage workers.

Yeah, that's probably too long. Maybe the set-up for the question could just mention that increasing the minimum wage causes unemployment. And keep the somber music.

Besides, is anyone really hoping for an increase in the minimum wage so they can get their first raise in ten years? Why the hell would someone making minimum wage ten years ago still be making minimum wage today? Most jobs that pay minimum wage are entry level. You're not supposed to stay in an entry-level job for ten years. Pick up a skill. Or two. Per decade.

I just read my first "Jeeves" novel, The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse. I'll write about it separately as a Book Note.

Jeeves is the prototypical super-butler always saving the day, always calm, possessing the most level head in time of crisis. Bertram Wooster is the wealthy gentleman always finding trouble. Lucky for him that he has Jeeves by his side.

Of course, portraying the rich as buffoons and their servants as sophisticated or witty is a well-worn comic premise, and the Wodehouse model has many recent echoes--think of Benson in Soap and Benson, Florence in The Jeffersons, the movie Arthur, the TV show Mr. Belvedere. Can you name others? I'm sure there's a long history of this going back way before Jeeves.

Aside from comic strategy, though, is there anything else at work in this narrative model? Psychological comfort for the poor to see the rich portrayed as stupid or concerned only with the trivial? Wishful thinking, that the only reason the rich are rich is the good fortune of birth?

Not that anything in Wodehouse's funny novel ought to be taken seriously. Using the wealthy as comic foils is fine by me. I did a fair bit of this in my first novel Lost. I guess I was less ideological then. Still, whatever gets the laugh.