McBudget Smells Worse Than a Filet-O-Fish

$290 per week. That's what a 40 hour per week minimum wage worker earns. Before taxes. That's $15,080 per year, provided the worker didn't miss a day of work due to illness or perhaps a vacation. $15,080. Before taxes.

Yet for some reason, McDonald's decided it could "help" its employees by showing that with proper budgeting, yes, you can live on a minimum wage if you just plan appropriately. Only they pretty much proved just the opposite.

Here are some of the main criticisms of it:

• It assumes the worker is working two jobs.

• It surmises that health insurance costs $20 a month.

• It doesn’t include child care, groceries, clothing or gas for the worker’s car.

• Also, another, possibly earlier, version of the budget (seen here) proposed that heating would cost $0 a month.

And there you have it. By the second line of their sample budget, they've already assumed you are working TWO minimum wage jobs. Or about 70 hours per week; 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, to attain that $2,060 per month. BEFORE TAXES.

Now granted, as a Forbes.com article states, they don't take into account the federal assistance that a minimum wage worker can receive, such as food stamps, child tax credits if applicable and what they may receive in income tax refunds. But THAT is not the point of the McBudget. Nowhere in this fantasy budget does it add other income in those forms. Besides the fact that if it were left up to House Republicans in Congress, they would do away with those very tax credits.

...the same House Republicans who unanimously voted in March against raising the minimum wage  have also just passed a farm bill stripped of the traditional funding for food stamps and are likely to demand deep cuts in this program in a deal with the Senate. They’re also pushing a 24% cut in the IRS’ budget.   What’s IRS funding got to do with minimum wage workers? It could (among other things) harm the IRS’ ability to fight the ongoing epidemic of identity theft tax  fraud  and lead to further deterioration of  already poor taxpayer service.  Both developments are likely to have a disproportionate impact on EITC recipients, who already have to wait months for their checks if their identities are stolen and (as National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson has pointed out) are already, in too many cases, denied earned income tax credits they rightly deserve. In the real world, that’s a bigger threat to minimum wage worker’s finances than silly financial McPlanning advice.

The kicker to this whole thing is the website address which carries this ridiculous budget: PracticalMoneySkills.com.

 Practical indeed.