“A Christmas Carol,” has always been my favorite Christmas movie, and I’m a pushover for any retelling of Charles Dickens’ classic novella.
Even 178 years after its publication — which, by the way, was a monstrous bestseller, selling out 13 editions within a year of its first edition — the story still resonates with people all over the world.
And it should be particularly meaningful to Mississippians.
After all, half of us are Bob Cratchit and 10 percent of the Tiny Tims in our state have no access to healthcare that might save their lives.
According to the story, Bob Cratchit’s salary was 15 shillings a week. In recent years, it’s been noted that in today’s wages, that’s an annual salary of $27,500 and an hourly wage of $13.50. As the sole wage-earner in a household of eight, Cratchit is now — and was then — a classic example of the working poor.
This summer, the Senate Labor Committee held hearings on the federal minimum wage, which stands at $7.25 per hour and hasn’t been increased since 2009.
In those hearings, the committee was informed that an individual in Mississippi would need to earn $11 per hour to cover the costs of basic necessities. For a family of six with two wage earners, the hourly wage to afford those necessities would be $14 per hour each.
Half of our state’s adults fall below the estimated income threshold needed to make ends meet.
As a sole wage-earner with a wife and six kids, today’s Bob Cratchit would need to earn $30 per hour or more (about $62,000) to provide the basic necessities of life.
Even that figure wouldn’t cover the cost of the medical attention Tiny Tim required. We aren’t told the nature of Tiny Tim’s affliction. He needed a crutch to walk, tired easily and his health was in decline. That’s all we really know. Medical experts today have several possible explanations — from a form of kidney disease, a type of tuberculosis common in the era, rickets, even polio, which was just emerging in the mid-1800s. Many of the illnesses could be attributed to poor nutrition, which among the poor is just as common today as it was then.
From time to time, there have been some efforts to alter the pitiful plight of Mississippi’s Bob Cratchits, at least when it comes to health care.
For 11 years now, our state has had the means of expanding Medicaid to as many as 300,000 people who find themselves in the households of the working poor — an extended Cratchit family, if you will.
Governor Tate Reeves won’t flinch in his cold-hearted opposition to Medicaid expansion. Although he supports some effort to expand health care availability, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann won’t even say the words “Medicaid Expansion,” so pejorative has the term become among conservatives.
Wages for state workers — including teachers and state troopers — are pitifully below the national average and there’s been only a tepid effort to do anything about that, either.
Clearly, what we need are ghosts.
It took three ghosts for Bob Cratchit to get a pay raise and medical care for poor Tiny Tim.
God only knows how many ghosts it will take to stir the consciences of Tate Reeves and the Mississippi Legislature.
As we have seen since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Governor is, as Ebeneezer Scrooge once was, a “man of business.” The Governor’s position seems to have fallen off the lips of Scrooge himself.
Medicaid expansion? Bah, humbug!
Teacher pay? Bah, humbug!
COVID-19 policies to protect the vulnerable? If they are going to die, let them do it and reduce the surplus population.
And so our story ends as it always ends in Mississippi:
God Help Us. Every One!
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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