$50 an hour to pick lettuce

Atrios has done a couple of posts today on something I wrote about two-and-a-half years ago when McCain insulted a group of unionized tradesmen by telling them they wouldn't pick lettuce for $50 an hour.

But I never heard the audio before.



His obliviousness is breathtaking.

I wrote earlier that McCain obviously had no idea how much money $50 an hour was. At 40 hours a week, that's an annual income of $104,000. I don't know too many who would refuse to pick lettuce or anything else for $104,000 a year. If you pay people a decent wage, most of them will be happy to do pretty much anything you want them to do.

And this was exactly what a couple of people in the audience shouted at McCain after he asserted that there are jobs that Americans won't do.

"Pay 'em the right wages!"

The $50-an-hour-to-pick-lettuce-in-Yuma remark was a direct response to that, and in the context of everything that has happened over last couple of days, I think he meant it.

I think John McCain really does not know what people earn in the American economy. He really does not understand the conditions under which people are struggling to feed, clothe, and shelter their families, and raise their children to adulthood.

McCain might really think that $100,000 is not enough money to entice someone to pick lettuce for a living. He probably has no frame of reference to appreciate the fact that in Yuma, Arizona, farmworkers earn about eight dollars an hour, for an average income of $16,820 a year, and that those people would fall on their knees and thank God for a 50 cent-an-hour raise.

McCain, who literally has more homes than he can count, has spent the summer characterizing as "elitist" a man who grew up on food stamps, studied hard, worked hard, and whose success is nothing less than the emodiment of The American Dream.

John McCain, who lives in luxury he never earned, has no clue about the value of a dollar. How can he be trusted with stewardship of the American economy?