Oklahomans are facing a true moral dilemma – to raise the minimum wage and help desperate neighbors or mimic the super-rich and their greedy, selfish ways, as they have tried to train us.
We will go to the polls June 16 with the opportunity to raise the state’s minimum wage – for the first time in 17 years! Since 2009, the minimum wage in Oklahoma has been $7.25 an hour.
Even before the Trump-flation of our president abetting Israeli expansionism, that $7.25 standard had failed to keep up with 17 years of rising prices.
According to Study Finance, citing federal statistics, “if you started with $1 in 2009, you would need to have $1.40 in 2026 to keep up with inflation rates. …A dollar in 2026 can buy 71.31% of what it could buy in 2009.”
Corporate interests hoping to keep Oklahomans impoverished are running ads trying to scare the rest of us about rising prices if state workers get a fair shake.
Yep, times are hard. Just imagine how tough they would be if you were still being paid by 2009 standards. Over the past 17 years, the cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security have risen by an average of 2.46% annually.
I guarantee you that it is not very much. But it is more than nothing, and an honest acknowledgement of the increasing cost of living.
This is where the vote becomes more than an economic one. Greedy corporations want us to mimic their selfishness – and according Oklahoma Labor Commissioner Leslie Osborn – pick up the tab for it.
If approved, SQ 832 would raise the state minimum wage to $12 an hour in 2027, $13.50 in 2028 and $15 an hour in 2029. After that, the hourly rate would depend on inflation.
Liars opposing raising the minimum wage have claimed that this will tie the state wage rate to outside forces.
Osborn, a Republican who supports raising the wage, answered that in on op-ed piece for The Oklahoman:
“That is a falsehood. The cost-of-living adjustment in SQ 832 uses … the very same measure we use for Social Security and military retirement benefits, that uses data from Oklahoma City and surrounding counties. This is Oklahoma data for Oklahoma workers.”
Corporate forces lying for their own benefit. Imagine that!
Oklahoma is stuck with Texas and Kansas at the $7.25 minimum wage, but other neighboring states are not. According to the U.S. Labor Department, those rich liberals in Colorado are paying $15.16, a whopping 16 cents more than those conservatives in Missouri. New Mexico’s minimum wage is $12 an hour and Arkansas’s is $11.
In an interview with KWTV, Osborn said red state neighbors Missouri and Arkansas, along with Nebraska, have already disproved the scare tactic warnings about the danger a fair wage poses to small businesses.
She told the TV station that raising the minimum wage would positively affect “over 200,000 kids across the state” and their parents. “That’s people that are going to bed hungry. These are people that are having to use government assistance that don’t want to, that are often working multiple jobs over 40 hours a week.”
In her op-ed piece, Osborn pointed out, “When a person works full time and still can’t afford rent, groceries and gas, they don’t just disappear. … And who pays for that public assistance? You do, we all do. Oklahoma taxpayers.”
She added later, “When a giant, profitable company pays poverty wages, it’s quietly shifting its labor costs onto the backs of taxpayers.”
Furthermore, Osborn wrote, by helping our neighbors “stand on their own two feet” – which, she says, is sound Republican philosophy – we will be putting more money into the economy.
Anytime anybody mentions how the oligarchs manipulate the masses to make themselves even richer – here trying to enlist us in their selfishness – their minions, like remoras feeding off a shark’s offal, claim it’s class warfare as if the super wealthy have not spent their entire lives rigging the economy to grab more than their fair share.
And the heart of their success depends upon dividing a snookered majority. The same solidarity that brought down the communists is needed now to defeat the billionaire overlords reducing us to peons. They do not want you to see: united we have power.
Vote YES on 832.
