Minimum Wage

The Valentine Constitution sets the minimum wage at $20 by 2024 whereafter it will increase with the cost of living to afford a healthful survival. Any CEO will tell you that minimum wage workers are cheaper than slaves. Housing, feeding, clothing, transporting, and health care cost more than minimum wage. Taxpayers now subsidize Wall Street companies by giving their underpaid workers welfare. A minimum wage of $20 will relieve us from having to pay all that welfare. Minimum wage workers will have to increase their productivity and value to their employers to warrant that pay grade. The most immediate effect will be significant pressure on workers to enhance their skills and productivity. Small businesses cannot afford to pay $20 per hour for the second rate workers that America’s schools and immigration policies now put into our market place. We, as a nation, will be forced to up our game individually and collectively. Each person will be forced to step up and acquire real world skills commensurate with their $40,000 annual salary. The Valentine Constitution’s educational provisions do just that. While the curriculum requires more than 4 years to fully prepare a student, it could make up most of that ground by 2024 by properly educating, mentoring and apprenticing the freshman classes of 2021, and post graduates in night classes.

Schools will offer continuing education classes during nights and on weekends for adults wishing to upgrade their skills and for K-12 students wishing to add additional real world perspectives to their daily studies, mentorships and apprenticeships. The Valentine Constitution calls on volunteer retirees to teach continuing education classes, credited or not, at nights and on weekends in their fields of expertise. These masters of their trades will begin a new cultural tradition of giving back to America, a tradition that will begin with a curriculum which focuses education on identifying and developing the gifts and aptitudes of K-12 students for twelve long years so that they can fulfill their God-given or natural destinies. As adults those students themselves will mentor students on the job, and eventually teach as adults.

A living wage is the backbone of the middle class. It adds stability to the family unit, decreases welfare requirements, reduces crime and the related expenses, creates an incentive to get and keep a job, pressures workers to find their gift and be more productive, provides a more competitive marketplace, encourages Citizen entrepreneurship and small business creation, and stimulates economic growth and innovation.

Workers who can afford to purchase the products they are making are a built in customer base for those products. We are all essentially making products for each other to purchase. Another provision requires that 75% of the products sold in America be made in America by American workers. These two provisions and others work together to ensure living wage jobs and solvent customers for durable quality American products we can also export, while decreasing the imports that have outsourced our jobs and reduced our wages to where we can only afford cheap short-lived imported junk which requires periodic replacement, rather than quality American products that last a long time. The kings and queens of Wall Street who’ve co-opted our economy and control our politicians for the price of a campaign contribution have manipulated workers and the Fed into enslaving half of our work force while making the other half pay the difference in welfare to the working poor. That’s fascism. The left wants to give everything away with no plan to pay for it. That’s socialism. The Valentine Constitution gives us free market capitalism with a level playing field so we can do what we do best, compete in local and foreign markets and insource enough money and jobs to rebuild our crumbling middle class and save our democracy from left and right fanatics.

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Valentine put all our issues into one piece of national legislation.

90% of Americans can get what we want most by compromising on issues we care less about.

We can now combine our power behind a single common goal and finally get what we’ve wanted for decades.

The amendments clause of our current constitution allows us to dictate solutions to our politicians and force them to vote on it.

Valentine spent 50,000 hours over 45 years adding solutions to all the modern problems our old Constitution fails to cover while keeping 90%, our foundations and rights intact.

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