

Letters to the editor 3/5

12:23 AM, Mar. 5, 2013  |  Comments
  • Filed Under

Guns would not have stopped Holocaust

In the letter, "People are oppressed when they have no guns" (Feb. 16), Chip Strydio writes that "at the risk of being politically incorrect, one should ask what if every Jew in Europe had had a gun, would there have been a Holocaust?" He is not politically incorrect, just very ill-informed. The Holocaust happened in what is today Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states, an area the historian Timothy Snyder has called the "bloodlands" in a recent book of the same name. In this area, between 1939 and 1942, the German army had just defeated the Polish and the Soviet armies, both of which were heavily armed. The suggestion that the Holocaust could have been prevented had Jews in Central Europe only hidden a pistol or shotgun under their beds is absurd. Opponents to reasonable gun control often tend to instrumentalize the crimes the Nazi regime committed for their own political purposes. The aim is to delegitimize the political opposition (gun control advocate = Nazi) in the absence of concrete evidence that in the history of the modern world private gun ownership had ever contributed to the overthrow of a tyrannical regime (the American Revolution included). But one shouldn't do so on the backs of the memory of 6 million murdered men, women and children.

Werner Steger


Raising minimum wage will not do enough

The proposal to raise minimum wage to $9 per hour is inadequate. According to the Working Poor Families Project, 32 percent of working families, with 47.5 million people, make less than twice the poverty line - they make about $45,600 a year for a family of four or $11.50 per hour for two full-time adult workers. Eleven percent of working families make less than the official poverty line, about $23,550, or $5.75 per hour. Twenty-five percent of all adults in low-income working families are employed in just eight occupations: cashiers, cooks, health aides, janitors, maids, retail salespersons, food servers, or drivers. The minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 per hour.

Three times the poverty line is $68,400, the approximate median household income now (about $17 per hour for two full-time adult workers), which has dropped from around $69,000 to $65,000 during the Great Recession. This is merely a "survival" line. Four times the poverty line is $92,200, about $23 per hour for two full-time adult workers, equal to what the minimum wage would be if indexed to management compensation since 1990. This is a "break even" line according to Kaiser Family Foundation, meaning the ability to pay for goods and services, repay loans, and contribute to savings/retirement plans, without additional debt. This is what it actually costs to live - and 67 percent of families are below that guideline.

We need universal living wage legislation, micro-enterprise support, amnesty for consumer/auto/medical/educational/residential debts, and social investment to end mass poverty and unemployment.

Akilano Akiwumi-Assani