More Pay For Service Workers

That's what "creative class" expert Richard Florida says American cities need:

FLORIDA: The first thing you have to do is figure out a way to engage the service companies, to call them together in a summit and say we're going to work together to boost the wages and productivity of service workers. At the same time, begin to work on more affordable housing options, begin to work on how to increase density. If you're in a city like Chicago or New York, where there is transit, encourage the development of more knowledge-intensive and creative work around transit nodes and connections. It's a whole complex of things that's going to make our cities more competitive and boost the wages, not only of the people at the talented one-third, but boost the wages of everyone.
INSKEEP: How do you encourage an upward pressure on wages in service jobs? Yes, there are some companies where they say that fits their business model, they want to treat their workers a certain way, but there are others companies that will constantly feel competitive pressure.
FLORIDA: Well, it's the same problem we faced in manufacturing. In the early 20th century we treated our manufacturing workers like crap. Workers worked maybe five, six, seven days a week, 12, 16, 18 hours a day and could barely put food on the table. And then during the Great Depression, some industrialists like Henry Ford or Lincoln Filene, and of course the great FDR, said hold on a second. If we're going to create demand that John Maynard King says stimulates the economy, how can we do that? Government can only fund so much. We're going to have to boost the wages of the workers who make the cars so they could buy the cars. Well, the same thing. If we want to boost demand in the United States, if we want a real stimulus today that's lasting, we have to boost the wages of nearly half of our workers who work in the service industry. The way to do that is not to falsely do it by just imposing minimum standards, although that may be worth doing in some big cities, by the way. The way to do that is to make their work more productive, to engage them in innovation, just like we did in our factories. When we began to organize workers in team, organize them in quality circles, engage them in continuous improvement, the factories got more productive and the wages of the workers went up.
INSKEEP: To listen to the workers - that's what you're telling me.
FLORIDA: The workers know best how to do their jobs. Whether it's in a manufacturing facility, you know, figuring out how to put that door panel on a car, or we found in our studies backed by the National Science Foundation a couple of decades ago, even when it came to environmental cleanliness, the workers knew best where to put the drip pans, how to stop the spills, how to keep the emissions in check. Listening to the workers and making them part of the solution, not just in factories, not just in Silicon Valley high-tech work, but in all sorts of work - that's the path to prosperity in the future.

This is basic common sense.  When people aren't making enough money to actually buy what they need, they need more pay.  When a lot of people make way more money than they will ever spend, they need to pay more money in taxes.  It isn't fucking rocket science.  Yet, I hear Republicans saying they need to cut state and federal income taxes and raise sales taxes because taxes on consumption are much better than taxes on income.  Not when people are only consuming what they have to to live.  Fuck.  And when folks are bringing in 300 million dollars a year and paying a lower percentage of their income in taxes than somebody making $60,000 a year, something is absolutely retarded.