Actually, it's NOT always the winners who write the history books.

If you did K-12 in the USA in public schools, there's a good chance you got your history from a book ("A People's History of the United States") written by an anti-American Marxist named Howard Zinn, who wrote his history books to be as anti-American as he could make them while still getting school boards to buy them. He was a big hit with left-leaning unionized school teachers who stuck up for the books any time they [the books] or he [Zinn] were criticized. If you were taught from this book, that would explain a lot.

Are you smart enough to notice the title of that book? It's no accident, as Zinn would brag. It's like "The People's Car" (the Volkswagen), "The People's army", "The People's Committe" or any other Marxist thing which is named as though it belongs to all the people in a Marxist utopian society. It's a deliberate finger-in-the-eye to anti-Marxists, and Zinn intended it that way. Zinn intended his book to aid in the re-programming of America's youth to be against the nation's history and culture and eventually spark a revolution.

Before you assert that I think that book ought to be burned, let me assert that I think it should be in all libraries, right alongside Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto so people will always be able to study the workings of truly evil, deceitful, warped minds.

The Japanese were NOT actually trying to surrender. SOME Japanese made an effort to stop the fighting on terms favorable, and this would have preserved the Imperial Japanese Empire in the form that had been running wild across the Pacific theater mass-murdering the innocent - an absolutely non-starter negotiating point. None of the allies would have accepted any of this, given the total disregard for diplomatic and societal norms they'd displayed. Remember: the attack on Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack on a Sunday Morning while Japanese diplomats in the capitol of the nation attacked were still actively pretending to be in a state of peace and in serious negotiations. While the war was underway, no norms of civilized nations were being observed by the Japanese. Oh, and while the war was underway, the Japanese were developing biological AND nuclear weapons to drop on the civilians of the US (a nation THEY sneak-attacked, NOT one that sneak-attacked them). The Japanese were told, immediately after Pearl Harbor, that they would eventually be required to make an unconditional surrender. There was no mystery to what the allies expected of them, and any scheme by them to do anything else constituted a stunt to delay matters, not an actual effort to stop the bloodshed.

If you SERIOUSLY study what the Imperial Japanese did for about a decade before the surrender, you would easily understand why nobody was going to accept some mealy-mouthed cease fire from them. The Empire had to be dismantled and the Japanese people disabused of the idea that their emperor was a God, or this would re-arise again with better weapons and even more ruthlessness. What happened in that war was awful. Far too many died on all sides, and far too many who would have preferred long peaceful lives were instead put into uniforms and sent out to kill. All of that awfulness, however, paved the way for a modern world in which the US and Japan are friends and the Japanese are a positive force in the world. None of the post-WWII Japanese have any responsibility for what happened in that war, and no post-WWII allied kids have ANY moral right to question the way their elders defeated that evil - they were not there and did not face it.

Oh, and I'll note that you posted YOUR drivel as an anonymous coward - showing an unwillingness to even post under an internet handle/avatar while being critical of people who put their lives on the line in the face of a global war and mass murder so bloody you cannot possibly comprehend it.

The saying "There are no winners in war" is a pure moron play. It's the trite stuff amateur script writers put into TV shows.

It's fine to declare that nobody should start a war, as an OPINION.

It's fine to state that lots of people are "losers" in war, as a fact.

It is, however, objectively false to state that there are no winners in a war - the winners are the winner, and most people are mighty happy about that. When the NAZIs decided to roll tanks and making the Polish people into losers, and then they decided the show the French how to lose a whole other type of Tour De France, Panzer style, making more losers, it became mighty important for some body with a better moral compass to come along and be winners. Had the allies not WON that war and not been WINNERS, Europe would be a mighty dark place (well, in all but skin colors of course). Had the allies not been WINNERS, it's possible that even the US and Canada might have fallen, depending on the progress of Germany's physicists and whether the Americans had been stupid enough to buy into the "everybody loses in war" crap and thus NOT do the Manhattan Project, and NOT do the Liberty ships and the massive production of planes and tanks and jeeps and trucks, etc.

For those who'd like to dismiss the whole violent misbehavior of the Germans of that era, perhaps you ought to read some damned history of the Pacific basin to see just how necessary it was for the allies to WIN there too. Try reading up on the "Rape of Nanking" and those spiffy little misdeeds of the Imperial Japanese Empire which were actual war crimes. If you're too wimpy to face it all, just start with Unit 731 and look into other happy little "incidents" like the happy little meals on Chichijima island

Younger generations are far too ignorant of history to make any profound statements about it; their teachers were too-often the old former sixties hippies, or even worse: air-headed youngsters TAUGHT by them - people who started shoveling wads of cotton candy into the brains of the little urchins in their care before they themselves had any life experiences in the real world. Those warped idiots playing teacher were far too busy stuffing their students' brains full of crap about prophylactics and alternate uses for dental dams, lots of newly-discovered genders, boys and girls being interchangeable, Marxism as a reasonable thing that might finally work if the right people got to try it, everybody deserving a trophy, etc and not nearly enough about how to read, write, and do math at grade level, how to read a map, where Western Civilization came from and how and why it arose, and how to reason like a person with an actual brain. People with functioning brains can actually face the fact that the world is a harsh, unforgiving place with a LOT of really psychopathic people in it, some of whom lead nations and start wars. It does not generally matter why they start them, when the psychopaths start wars, somebody else damned well needs to come along and WIN them, or the human race descends into a nightmare run by those victorious psychopaths and the masses of amoral drones who willingly serve them as they grind the innocent into the ground.

I knew too many people who served in that war to just stand by and watch some idiot who knows nothing of value try to re-write history or pretend that what was done by the allies was not ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY and justified. The wonderful Japan the world knows today, that is, as much as any other nation, a "good actor" on the world stage is only possible because, in LOSING that war (and losing it the WAY they lost it), they learned that their emperor was not, in fact, a God.

IIRC Lovell was the first Astronaut to fly to the moon twice, yet he never got to land there (Apollo 8 had no LM, and Apollo 13 needed the LM as a lifeboat rather than a lander).

Think about it, and how YOU might respond if you worked for years to be among the most-elite and to walk on the moon and actually got so close, yet were unable to complete the task you'd aimed yourself at with intense focus, TWICE, and with nobody, including yourself, to blame. Typical cool, level-headed, self-controlled test pilot...an American with The Right Stuff.

People here are commenting on the life of an American hero who, by all counts, lead an extraordinary and exemplary life, and you turn it into a political rant against [of course] The Bad Orange Man. It's childish, and annoying, and says more about you and your character than it says about either Mr Lovell or Mr Trump.

There's a certain type of derangement that cannot keep a thought to itself. Apparently it's a shared trait of vegans and people deranged by Trump. Normal people see Trump as a sort of carnival barker business guy who got elected and was about as partisan as the average president, as verbally clumbsy as a Bush, as flat in his speaking as some AI voice, doing some stuff Republicans long promised to do but didn't, saying and doing stuff Democrats USED TO say and support (he WAS a Democrat most of his life), and most-importantly, a guy who will leave office in several years and be replaced by the next flawed and imperfect president who will be similarly partisan in his/her own way, and similarly upset/anger opponents while pleasing supporters. Historians will marvel at how this one man made so many people spin-off into madness and lose all self-control.

"34 felony convictions" Really? Still on that campaign stunt? It disappeared from the news because it did not work... it was a junk case that everybody with a brain knows will be overturned on appeal; it's only actual purpose was to give the Democrats a campaign talking point. The 34 counts are all the same one thing, and THAT was not even illegal - it was an act that could only be construed as illegal if it was covering another crime. The judge had to instruct his rigged jury that they could find Trump guilty even if they could not agree on the underlying crime - so they convicted without agreeing on a crime and they specified no crime in their ruling. To this day, NOBODY has seen an official court document specifying the actual crime. This WILL be overturned on appeal. Even the nation's top Democrat lawyers know this, and they would not want it to stick, because this scheme could then be deployed against Democrats in Republican jurisdictions.

"Bankrupted six casinos" Know any recent history? Atlantic City was being setup to be a new East Coast version of Las Vegas, where gambling would be legalized (it used to only be legal in Nevada). Trump, and others, built casinos there. If THAT was the end of the story, and Trump's casinos failed, then sure, it would make Trump look singularly dumb. That's NOT, however, what happened. Sprinkle in some legislation and some court rulings, and it became legal for native American tribes to run casinos on their reservations. Suddenly, people did not need to fly to Vegas to gamble, or to Atlantic City either. Atlantic City, with little casino history belly flopped. Vegas, re-tooled and tried to make itself a family vacation destination and host to conventions. Trump got out of his Atlantic City investment. Atlantic City casinos eventually rebounded a bit, but it never became the "sure thing" it was intended to be. Your tired talking point about Trump's casinos is as devoid of context as if you had derided somebody for allowing his Pacific Palisades home to burn down, without any reference to the Palisades wildfire.

"Laundered money for the Russians" OK, this one's just plain slanderous. You have no evidence here of anything. It's as fake as the Hillary-Clinton-funded "dossier" claim that Trump [a guy Democrats used to famously accuse of being a germophobe] paid prostitutes to urinate on his bed in Russia. The Democrats had 8 YEARS to try to prove this accusation to a Democrat-run Department of Justice, and never had any evidence of it. All they had were lies they paid people to repeat. Those lies worked well to agitate and animate the Democrat party's base voters, and they sure sounded solid rolling off the lips of countless Democrat "journalists", but they failed where it mattered: in the legal system. Remember the claims Trump had a computer in Trump Tower electronically tied to a Russian Bank? Yup, they never had a shred of evidence...just more lies on the heap of lies they kept telling the viewers of MSNBC to whom they breathlessly promised Trump would be seen serving years in prison.

I have my own issues with Trump, and he clearly does not need me defending him here... he's done quite well in the courts with his lawyers and in the 2024 election cycle. I'm just here pointing out how deranged your regurgitation of failed DNC talking points is. Those points you cited were all cooked-up to generate headlines that would sink the Trump campaign, and they FAILED to perform that function. Rage against the President all you want...it's a free country,,, but the talking points you're using are stale, and long-debunked. Do some original thinking. Come up with same creative fake accusations of your own. Show some initiative! Just relying on Joe and Mika is lazy.

The elimination of the Executive Order would effectively eliminate the Constitution and the basic structure of our government.

1. The Constitution sets up 3 branches: Legislative (to write the laws, provide the funds, and provide oversight), Executive (to execute the laws and manage foreign policy and wars), and Judicial (the referees and interpreters of the Constitution).

2. The Constitution defines the number of members of the House and Senate (the Legislative Branch) and the manner in which they are elected, But only defines the Executive branch as the President, vesting all powers and responsibilities for that branch into his hands - this form is called a "unitary executive". The President can hire lots of people to work in the executive branch, in his cabinet and in agencies etc, but they all operate under his authority and direction. Some of these people are important enough that they require approval of the Senate, but the basic principle that they follow the orders of the president and serve at his pleasure stand. Incidentally, this is why it's impossible to have any person in the executive branch (like at the FBI) who out-ranks the president or who can have access to more-classified stuff than the President (like some general - that's the stuff of poorly written movies).

3. The congress is free to write the laws the way they choose, and allocate funds too with as little or as much detail as they choose (and as they can get a president to sign into effect). It's the duty of the president to carry out these laws and spend the allocated funds.

4. Where the congressional laws and/or budgets are vague or very general, SOMEBODY has to decide on the exact specific implementation. This is what Executive Orders do. A president writes an order to the people in the executive branch (his employees, acting under his authority) telling them how to implement the laws the congress wrote. If congress allocates money for a battleship, but does not specify what size guns if has, or what to name it, or what color to paint it, a President must build it, but is free to either leave his employees on autopilot to do it the traditional way, or he can issue an Executive Order saying "Paint it gray, put 16" guns on it, and name it after the state of Nevada".

Most executive orders are invisible to the average citizen, because they do entirely non-controversial things. Sometimes, however, Presidents use them to drive policies they know the congress did not intend but which they think can fit through a verbal loophole in the existing legislation. In those cases, either a court will slap them down, or the congress is to blame for writing sloppy laws. Congress could write a literacy law calling for the education department to buy kids books, then an Obama could issue an EO telling them to buy his "Dreams From My Father" (outraging Republicans) and then a Trump could get in and issue an EO ordering the purchase and distribution of copies of his "The Art of the Deal" (outraging Democrats) - both would be stretching things a bit, but the fault would lie with congress for writing a dumb and poorly worded law.

If there are to be no Executive Orders, then you're saying the president cannot order the people in the executive branch to do things... and that completely screws-up the structure of our government, effectively saying the Chief Executive, in whom all executive powers are vested, may not USE those powers, meaning the executive branch cannot execute policies.

Bill Clinton is the low hanging fruit here, so I'll just bypass it as the hyper-obvious rebuttal to your post.

How about Democrat hero Woodrow Wilson, after which many things were named-in-honor by Democrats? Let's see here: [1] He was a racist who screened the pro-KKK film "The Birth of a Nation" in the White House, then went on to segregate the federal government along racial lines. [2] He gave us the Fed, putting our money in the hands of a board of private bankers. [3] He reduced tariffs and shifted the financial burden to a new thing, called a federal income tax, which he promised would only affect the richest 3% of the population, hitting them with a rate of 1%. In the end, like Biden, he was so decrepit that his aides were lying to the public about his health and his wife was running things.

How about Democrat hero Andrew Jackson, after whom the Democrats named their famous fund raising "Jefferson Jackson Dinners"? [1] He owned hundreds of slaves. [2] He lived with another man's wife. [3] He killed a man in a duel. [4] He condemned opponents of slavery as monsters and said they should die. [5] He pushed most native Americans out of the lands east if the Mississippi river. Ever hear of "the trail of tears"?

Of course, there's the oft-cited Nixon who committed several crimes while trying to cover-up the fact that, without his prior knowledge or participation, some of the people working for him got caught breaking into the Watergate hotel to try to plant bugs in the phones at the Democrat campaign headquarters... but this one has lost its bite now that we have the documented proof that Obama bugged candidate Trump, and used both the FBI and CIA to try to stop him from getting elected, and then having failed at that, to handicap his administration, using as justification a "dossier" he knew at the time was made-up campaign crap (read-up on the August 2016 Oval Office meeting with Obama, Biden, and the FBI leadership on the dossier...)

Yeah, that's a mighty strange scale on your outrage-o-meter if Trump's the one pegging it.

Consider (and while I'm gonna mention Trump, it's NOT about him so don't get distracted) what just happened in a broader context:

Jim Acosta was a journalist at CBS and then, for almost 20 years, at CNN. In his time at CNN he famously got into many arguments with Trump in which Trump accused him of being or providing "fake news", a charge Mr Acosta loudly decried. If he ever was a neutral and unbiased journalist, that time was long ago - he has clearly allowed his personal views into his work for years now, but probably a large portion of his audience did not mind and would have sided with him on the whole "fake news" kerfuffle. But now, after years of arguing that the "fake news" accusation was a lie, he has allowed his personal biases to cloud his judgement so much that he has literally cooked-up and reported "fake news" in the form of an "interview" of an AI-driven animated picture of a dead person supposedly giving answers the dead person WOULD HAVE given IF he was not dead. Yup. A supposedly neutral and unbiased journalist has been driven by his own political passions to create and report completely fake news.

I suppose I could have a lot of different reactions to this one, but I'm actually just dumbstruck. I cannot grasp how this man could have thought this was a good idea, given the larger context.

Consider the hyperbolic blather the article begins with: "Plastics are a “grave, growing and under-recognised danger” to human and planetary health, a new expert review has warned." PLANETARY HEALTH??? Really? Sounds like something from a Star Trek movie... "it's the Genesis device, and it's a threat to planetary health, Jim."

YES, there are lots of irresponsible people improperly disposing of plastics, and yes there are plenty of things being made of plastic that ought to be made of something else (or, as in the place of lots of trinkets, probably not made at all). The people complaining however, do not want anybody thinking about two things:

[1] They are likely also opposed to the best disposal method... burning the plastics to generate energy. We extract enormous quantities of petroleum from the ground annually and burn it for energy, but some we make into plastics. If, when we are done with those plastics, we then burn them for energy then we are getting double use of the material. Think of of as a form of recycling. If we burned the stuff in large power plants with proper emissions controls then it would not be polluting the oceans and showing up everywhere as microplastics.

[2] Plastics are also an important and growing life-saving thing, and removing them from use would endanger the life of nearly every human being. We package food, water, medicine, medical equipment, etc in plastics to keep them safe from contamination. Millions of people world-wide are alive today who might not otherwise be, because they were not sickened at some point in their lives by food, beverages, or medical things contaminated in non-plastic packaging, or sickened by contamination of re-used non-plastic items improperly cleaned between uses. There are also millions of people around the world, including myself and nearly every one of my relatives, who were at some time in their life hospitalized and had many medical procedures done with lots of plastics involved for sterility. There's an absolutely mind-blowing amount of plastics used in modern medical settings, all of it replacing far inferior stuff of the past that was glass or metal or paper. We also get to use a fresh [plastic] syringe for injections now and plastic bags and needles for IVs etc where we used to use the same stuff over and over again and from patient to patient, washing between uses. All sorts of contamination events were erased when plastics came along.

The constant attacks on plastics are much like the constant raging against the imperfections of the US... they lack a key element of sanity in the form of a very simple question: "Compared to WHAT?"

WHO is in office and what political party they belong to. These medical and tech giants are determined to get their way. The Clintons tried this, Obama tried it, Some leading "establishment" Republicans wanted it and would have tried it if elected president, and now apparently Trump is about to piss off his base trying it... it seems to be originating this time with Bobby Kennedy and his people who have been doing some very positive stuff and who Trump has apparently come to trust.

I am not asserting any ill-will or bad intentions to any of these folks of either party in this case; electronic records keeping always SEEMS and SOUNDS like a great, efficient, idea. I'm sure that each, in his time, has been approached with people pushing all the apparent advantages to this stuff, tailored to the interests of the president in question at the time. SOME special interests, it seems, cannot be stopped when they dedicate decades to their efforts.

The medical industry has already proved itself completely incapable of maintaining confidential health records - it insists on running many thousands [millions?] of computers with un-patched and obsolete versions of Windows, teamed with garbage apps and monumentally bad security practices and barely a week goes by without some headline screaming about another data breach or ransomware attack on a health company. I've received something like 5 notices of such breaches involving my data within the past 12 months alone. The people running our healthcare companies are as qualified to handle our data as my neighbor's 5 year old kid (who actually would probably do a better job guarding my data). We have run the experiment. At this point, NOBODY should be putting ANY medical data into electronic form and storing/transmitting it until we can put in place some REAL penalties for CEOs who are reckless with it - something like: if the medical records a company holds are stolen, the CEO goes to prison at hard labor for the rest of his/her life. Sounds harsh? No penalty that not scary enough to out-weigh the benefits they get from their recklessness will get these people to be responsible. The threat of some small fine, for example, is nothing to a guy who'll net millions in bonuses if he runs a slightly riskier IT department to save the company money.

What's the old saying? "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice..." well how about "fool me two hundred times?"

Oh, and one other thing: Why do we need to fix ANYTHING in healthcare anymore? We're all living under Obamacare, which was supposed to fix everything. Remember: the stupid, feckless, incompetent, moron Republicans on Capitol Hill promised to repeal it, but they never actually managed to...the closest they got was in Trump's first term when they got really close to a PARTIAL repeal but then Senator John McCain (R-AZ) strolled into the Senate chamber and gave a thumbs down... his way of sticking it to Donald Trump, who he despised. The Obamacare law is in effect, and has been for about 15 years now.

They're NOT just "missing some papers"... they have no right to HAVE such papers; They're here in the country ILLEGALLY, having broken-in in complete disregard for US law, and the opinions of the American people. They KNOW they are doing wrong, and they are doing it anyway - it's in-your-face lawlessness They do not show ANY consideration to the opinions of the American people. Furthermore, they're not just innocently lurking here without a piece of paper... they're either working here ILLEGALLY and using somebody else's stolen Social Security Number (in other words they're engaged in another crime: Identity Theft, and another one: Fraud) or they're on public assistance (illegally) and probably getting away with that using fraud. If they're uninsured (a near 100% chance) then they are consuming healthcare at the expense of the American taxpayer and standing in line to get that care, thereby delaying the delivery of care, in the ER for example, to American Citizens and taxpayers. Oh yeah, if they are working and getting paid under-the-table, they are helping evil employers push down the wages and benefits of all working class Americans.

Somebody who breaks into your house, starts eating the food in your fridge, and pocketing part of your paycheck, is NOT an "undocumented family member", that's a hostile act of passive-aggressive behavior by a criminal intruder, and it's the absolute duty of the government to kick them out.

Is on display right here in one posted story.

If you are pushing a message, and claim it's "the SCIENCE", and you are not getting the reception you wish for among the populace and your conclusion is that you need a way to either massage the information or manipulate the way you present it in order to manipulate people into doing what you want, You are NOT "the SCIENCE", you are NOT doing science, and you are going to undermine your credibility and the credibility of all science - you are doing POLITICS and everybody can see it. The manipulation of populations is POLITICAL. Science is APOLITICAL.

We can all go back and forth arguing about "climate change" - we've done it here on Slashdot many many times and no-doubt will do so into the future. This story, however, is less about climate change or science, generally, at all than it is about left-leaning politics and the complete blindness to the concept that by swirling politics and science together and using political techniques to try to manipulate the public, the very people who keep claiming to be the ones embracing science are actually the ones stomping all over the reputation of all sciences in the minds of the masses. I have come to despise this destruction of confidence in science which is being done by all this garbage. Stop claiming to love science while doing everything you could possibly do to undermine the public's confidence in it! People can tell they are being politically manipulated on the climate stuff. Stop it. If you keep this up, you will end up convincing people not to believe in chemistry and physics and think that even those "pure" sciences are actually just politics-in-a-mask.

If you are so certain about climate change, then by all means do your research and publish your results just as would be done in any other field of science, but then you need to let the public do what they will about it, as any other field does. It's NOT a scientific act to try to swing public opinion to accept a conclusion. You never see physicists trying to manipulate public opinion like this. The people involved in this are guilty of a classic error; they think THEIR field is the only field, or the most important field, and that everybody must be made to agree with them because they are the keepers of the sacred knowledge. The hubris is astounding.

be productive and invent new tech (like telephones, semiconductors, air travel, nuclear power, etc), help people around the world to eat, survive disasters, etc and occasionally intervene to stop the World Wars that so many of those "happy" less productive and smugly-superior people start...

I'm, frankly, tired of being lectured by people from inconsequential countries who then, in nearly every catastrophe, ask "Where are the Americans?" and whose representatives routinely show up at NATO, SEATO, and UN meetings to demand American taxpayers shell-out billions of more dollars for "the less fortunate", as though the people "happy" to be less productive are somehow blameless for being so less productive and therefore needy.

At this point, I'd happily see MY life made easier so I could be "happier", any new American tech kept only for Americans, and ALL American tax funds to entities outside the US completely shut off, with the answer to all requests/demands for American funds/support answered with a firm, "NO, our citizens are happier now"

Let's see here... In the 40 years you cited, the minimum wage went from $3.25 to $20 and you dismiss that?

Remember: the so-called "minimum wage" is not supposed to be the wage a head-of-household takes home and uses to provide for a family. It's a starter wage intended for highschool and college students and others who are getting their first jobs in fast food places and grocery stores etc. It's a wage for unskilled people who are developing some work experience and a few skills that will, in turn, help them move on to better paying jobs with more responsibility. There was a moment in one of the "town hall" discussions leading up to the 2008 election where a guy asked then-candidate Obama for help making it so that he could support himself (and a presumably a current or probably future family) on his burger flipper job at McDonalds... and when I saw this I knew we were in trouble. This guy clearly did not understand that he needed to develop some skills and MOVE ON, freeing up that job for some other newbie. There need to be entry level jobs for people just starting out, and some jobs simply do not add enough value to justify a wage fit for a family to live on.

Boosting the minimum wage is nothing but an inflationary act. Mandating that somebody pay more for a job than the value that job provides causes one of three things: [1] The job will go undone, [2] The job will be done illegally with workers paid under-the-table, or [3] the job WILL be done at the higher wage and then workers just above the old minimum wage will demand an increase since they are suddenly at or below minimum, and then the ones above them will demand raises, and as this propagates the prices for products and services must rise, etc and in the end everybody is back to where they were (relative to each other) but all the prices are higher and the unit of currency is worth less than it was. Sound familiar? Yeah, the basic economic laws are as inviolable as the laws of physics.

Raising (or even HAVING) a minimum wage is great politics; it makes ignorant people temporarily happy and get them motivated to vote for some candidate. Over the long run, however, its only real impacts are to encourage illegal actions in employment (hiring of illegal workers, un-taxed under-the-table payment, etc) which actually hurt average workers, and to be a driver of inflation. This is why the minimum wage is never enough and there are ALWAYS calls to make it higher - it's simply economically IMPOSSIBLE to ever make it high enough. Over time, the economy will adjust to any change in it, and everything will drive the numbers so that the minimum wage is a starter wage that will not support a family. The era of it acting to help employees in inescapable company-run coal mining towns is as long gone as the 1930s and just as likely to return.