Ace Armstrong’s Speech to the
1998 Living Wage Coalition Fund Raiser and Rally

December 9, 1998

My name is Ace Armstrong, and most of you who are familiar with me know me as a radio personality and a comedian. You’re used to hearing me joke around a lot, and be goofy. But tonight I want us all to ban together and do something important: stop the spread of the Backstreet Boys. Please! Someone! Make them stop!

That’s my personal goal, but it’s not why we’re here tonight. Tonight’s event is about something almost as important: the ability of the average person to make a living. Some of you are already familiar with the Living Wage initiative. For those of you who aren’t, let me explain what proposal is all about.

Lets say a big company—we’ll call it, Bob’s International House of Horribly Overpriced Crap—wants to put a factory in Kalamazoo. Of course, everyone is excited because that means lots of jobs for people in Kalamazoo making horribly overpriced crap. But these new jobs come with a price. The company want huge tax breaks. They want special favors. They want to be able to sacrifice your first born on nights when there's a full moon. All in return for placing an official Bob’s International House of Horribly Overpriced Crap in Kalamazoo.

So what happens? The Kalamazoo City Council gets together and says, "We'll give you the tax breaks and special favors, and you can sacrifice the first born of people in Portage, because they can't vote us out of office." So the factory goes in, and then Bob's International House of Horribly Overpriced Crap hires a few hundred people—at minimum wage.

Let me explain something about minimum wage: it’s not enough to live on. As one of my fellow comics, Chris Rock, puts it: "Minimum wage is like saying, ‘If I could pay you less, I would!’"

Let’s say you’re making slightly over minimum wage. We’ll put you at $5.50 an hour. At 40 hours a week, that’s $220 a week before taxes; and remember, since you’re not a big multi-national corporation selling horribly overpriced crap, you don’t get any special tax breaks. So, we’ll take out $20 a check for taxes, leaving you with $200 a week, or $800 a month. A one-bedroom apartment will probably cost you $350 a month, so that leaves us with $450. You’ve got to eat, so we’ll take out $100 more. You have to have heat, so there goes another $50. That leaves us with $300 a month.

One of the things Bob’s International House of Horribly Overpriced Crap didn't demand is a bus line that runs from your apartment to their factory. So, if you’re going to go to work at Bob’s International House of Horribly Overpriced Crap, you’re going to have to have a car. Let’s give you a decent used car for $150 a month. We’ll say you’ve been a pretty good driver, so your insurance runs $75 a month or so. But, hey, we're still doing okay, here. We don't have a lot of money left, but there's a little.

You’ve got to have a telephone, or else your boss can’t get ahold of you, so that’s another $30 a month. That leaves us with $45. If you live in an apartment, you don’t own a washer and dryer, so it costs you another $10 or so a week to do laundry. Congratulations! Assuming you don’t ever get sick, don’t have to buy gas for your car, you don’t have any school loans to repay, and you don’t ever need to buy any clothes, you’re going to make horribly overpriced crap for Bob’s huge zillion dollar multinational corporation and still come out with a profit of $5.00 a month. Won’t that be something to brag about at the class reunion?

That’s not even an acceptable, realistic income for a single guy living on his own. What if you have a family? A couple of kids? The odds are, you’re going to be receiving some help from the government in the form of food stamps and/or welfare.

This means that the taxpayers—the people who gave Bob’s International House of Horribly Overpriced Crap that huge tax break in the first place—are going to spend more money to help Bob’s International House of Horribly Overpriced Crap's employees because Bob’s International House of Horribly Overpriced Crap isn't paying them enough for them to break even. In other words, the tax breaks and special favors the city gave to the company ends up costing the taxpayers more than they gain. In the meantime, the CEO of Bob’s International House of Horribly Overpriced Crap is taking home several million dollars a year, part of which he got because the city gave him that huge tax break.

And that’s what the living wage proposal is all about: making sure that companies that get a break from the community give the community a break in return.

It’s very simple: all we have to do is require that if companies gets tax breaks, that they promise to pay their employees enough to support their families. It seems to me that in a climate where everyone is talking about family values, it shouldn’t be too much to ask for our government and our employers to place a little value on our families.

Having said that, you’re going to hear a lot this evening from people who are going to tell you why you should support the living wage proposal. So, in the interest of fairness and equal time, I’m going to spend a couple of seconds telling you why you shouldn’t support the living wage proposal.

Poverty builds character. We all know corporate CEOs are slimy weasels who make millions of dollars a year. By keeping their employees at minimum wage and below the poverty level, corporations are just ensuring that the poor stay honest and maintain their integrity.

If you’re poor, you don’t have to buy Christmas presents for people you don’t like. If you really don’t like your cousin Melvin, you don’t have to buy him a Christmas present when you’re poor! You can just say, "I can’t afford to buy anyone gifts this year!" and you’re off the hook!

Most domestic arguments are about money. When married people fight, they usually do so over money. By making sure that there’s not money in the household, corporations are helping maintain blissful marriages and reduce the divorce rate.

Golf courses are already crowded enough. Those darn middle income people who only make $200,000 a year are crowding up the golf courses as it is; if everyone could afford green fees, the courses would be way too crowded and nobody would ever be able to play. Very little business would ever get done, and doctors would be grouchy all the time. By keeping people poor, we are keeping the golf courses roomy and medical services friendly.

Poverty ensures jobs! Food stamps don’t just grow on trees, ya know! The government has to hire somebody to handle all those welfare case loads. The more poor people we have, the more government jobs are safe.

The world is already overpopulated. By paying people a living wage, we are only encouraging them to start families and contribute to the overpopulation of our planet. If anything, we should make everyone work for free until we’ve reduced the population a good 50% or so.

Now, if those arguments haven’t swayed you, and you’re still determined to help out the Living Wage Coalition in its efforts to secure decent wages in return for tax breaks, here’s what you can do to help:

Let your voice be heard! Write to the city council, and explain to them why this is an important issue for everyone here in Kalamazoo. Explain to your friends and family why issue affects everyone in the community. There are petitions in the lobby. These petitions do a couple of things. First of all, they show that there is support for this proposal. Second, each signature on that petition multiplies the value of all previous signatures. One signature may not mean much to a city councilman; two signatures may not mean much. But a hundred or two hundred or a thousand signatures will have an impact. Every single signature counts, and the more signatures we have, the more impact we will make.