In case you were wondering why $600 was the weekly stipend, or “bridge payment,” to the unemployed from the Federal Government, Murfster35 on The Daily Kos thinks they know:
… there has always been something that bothered me about that $600 a week payment. As explained, it was meant to help families and workers cover the shortfall between what they would receive from unemployment, and what their full paycheck was before being laid off. And if that was the purpose, then the program was far oversubscribed for what it set out to do. Now my wife works in retail, so she’s not making Brad Pitt wages, and still, that $600 a week was multiples above what was needed to make her whole. I know that the whole object was to render as much aid to as many people as possible, but I would guess that in a majority of cases, people were actually profiting from the program.
The question that has bothered me every time I see that $600 in Teri’s account is Why $600 a week? The number can’t possibly be arbitrary, there has to be some kind of sensible reason behind it. It seems almost like the Democrats jammed it to the GOP because they had them over a barrel, which is fine by me, but that still doesn’t make sense. There has to be a reason why they settled specifically on $600 a week.
And last night, while just idly discussing the topic with Teri, it whupped me upside the head. Let’s start with a little simple math. It has to be simple if I’m going to do it. Start with $600 a week. Now, divide that $600 by a 40 hour work week. What do you end up with? $15.00 an hour!
Now that makes perfect, crystal clear sense. The Democrats have been pushing for a national $15 an hour minimum wage for at least the last three years. But there’s a problem with that, it’s purely conceptual. The Democrats talk about how great it would be, and everybody agrees that it would be great, but talk is cheap, and nobody had any way to know what it would feel like to make $15 an hour.
So the Democrats took the bull by the horns and showed them what it feels like to make $15 an hour. Without saying a word to tip their mitts, the Democrats used the terrible unemployment shortfalls to show every American making less than $15 an hour what it feels like to make $15 an hour. For 16 weeks they have handed the neediest Americans a weekly $15 an hour paycheck. And now the GOP wants to take it away.
Spreading discontent with Republican governance at every opportunity.
