More People Are Turning to Food Banks

From the AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than 25 million Americans turned to the nation's largest network of food banks, soup kitchens and shelters for meals last year, up 9 percent from 2001.

Those seeking food included 9 million children and nearly 3 million senior citizens, says a report from America's Second Harvest.

While our nation is supposedly enjoying job creation and economic growth, more and more people are unable to eat. (I, I must confess, am not one of those people; I've been eating way too much lately, rendering my intense daily workouts moot.) I am no economist, but I understand firsthand the financial insecurity caused by rising costs of necessities such as energy and healthcare; I also know that wages, when adjusted for inflation, have been dropping. (See also this and this.)

Maybe it's time to revist the old Tinley Fair Wage Plan. I would like to emphasize especially the "wage ratio" component of my plan:

The wage ratio is the cornerstone of the Fair Wage Plan. The ratio of a company's largest annual salary to its smallest annual salary for a full-time worker would be fixed. I will need to do further research to determine what a reasonable wage ratio might be, but say it's 10. If a company's least-paid full-time worker earns $15,000 per year, the best-paid executive would only be allowed to make $150,000 per year.

With a wage ratio, when executives succeed, low-level workers succeed, and vice versa. Thus increased wages would necessarily be a result of economic growth.