Making a Difference Essay

The song I chose was “Harlem Streets” by Immortal Technique. This artist is known for frequently speaking out against the government and addressing many issues in society. One of the topics addressed on the song is minimum wage, “And you can’t raise a family on minimum wage, Why do you think most of us are locked in the cage.” Immortal Technique describes how the minimum wage is so low it is not enough to raise a family so many people in the ghetto have to resort to illegal crime in order to survive and since it pays more. But the minimum wage in California will now rise to $9.00 on July 1, this year, and to $10.00 in 2016. Many people wonder whether this will eventually have a negative outcome on the economy instead of a positive one. I think it the outcome will be positive only short-term, because the price of good will have to eventually rise while jobs may lower because employers might hire less workers since they have to pay the current workers more money.
Another topic he talks about in the song is healthcare, “A generation of babies born without healthcare, families homeless, thrown off the welfare.” He shows how healthcare is so expensive for families that they are not able to have any healthcare. But now Obamacare has taken into place this year and they now have another bill to pay, since it is required for everyone.
One thing I disagreed with in the song was when he stated most of the army was either black or Latino. What he might’ve meant was how before and in the early Vietnam war era, Many middle and upper class white people avoided being drafted by going to college, while blacks and Latinos were unable to do this since they could not afford it, so they were drafted to the army. But besides this, statistics show that more than half of the U.S. army is Caucasian while Hispanics and African Americans combine for around 30%.