Chris Powell: New fast-food kiosks rebut promoters of minimum-wage rise

Electronic order kiosks have been installed as part of the renovation of the McDonald's restaurant on West Center Street in Manchester, Conn. There's no one inside the machine to ask if you want fries with that quarter-pounder with cheese. 

You push buttons to register your order yourself. Thereby hangs a tale that Connecticut's political class will do its best to ignore. The kiosks are the mocking rebuttal to the demands that Connecticut increase its minimum wage so that every job pays enough to support a family, demands rooted in the delusion of something for nothing, the delusion that employers can pay more than the market's judgment of the value of the work done.

The kiosks also are the mocking rebuttal to Connecticut's public school system, whose rising graduation rate is celebrated by Gov. Dannel Malloy even as half or more of the state's high school graduates fail to master high school math or English. Soon not even "careers" in fast food may be available to the uneducated and unskilled bearing meaningless diplomas. If they are lucky, their limited vocabularies will still include "cheeseburger" and "fries" and the kiosks will accept EBT cards so they won't have to figure the cost of their lunch

Since they are a reaction to government's impoverishing and dumbing down society and leaving young people unqualified for skilled work, the kiosks also may be a mocking rebuttal to Connecticut's newspapers, which have let government get away with it even though newspapers require customers who are literate, interested in civic life, and able to earn enough money to afford a subscription.

Four years ago, arguing that this impoverishment and dumbing down were damaging newspapers far more than the growth of the Internet was, this writer observed: "Newspapers still can sell themselves to traditional households -- two-parent families involved with their children, schools, churches, sports, civic groups, and such. But newspapers  cannot  sell themselves to households headed by single women who have several children by different fathers, survive on welfare stipends, can hardly speak or read English, move every few months to cheat their landlords, barely know what town they're living in, and couldn't afford a newspaper subscription even if they could read. And such households constitute a rising share of the population."

That observation drew denunciation around the world -- from Hartford, where the Courant editorialized against it  twice against it, giving it more scrutiny than the newspaper applied to the governor at that time, to New Zealand, where a columnist for the country's largest newspaper called it a lame excuse for the failings of this writer's own newspaper.

Single mothers and their negligent parenting, the scorners insisted, could not possibly have anything to do with the decline of the press. Yet now it is widely accepted that the impoverishment and neglect of children are the primary causes of their failure in school. Indeed, in testimony last year supporting the latest school-financing lawsuit in Connecticut, East Hartford's school superintendent echoed the infamous observation.

He said his schools are hobbled because 71 percent of their students are so poor that they qualify for free or discounted lunches, 15 percent have learning disabilities, 12 percent don't speak English, many need social workers to make up for parental neglect, and many are transient and disoriented, moving in or out of town or their school district during the school year as their families, most headed by single women, lose and regain housing.

Most such students, the superintendent said, never catch up. In spite of political correctness, no schools like that are going to produce newspaper readers, skilled workers, or good citizens.

 Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.