Oklahoma bans cities from raising minimum wage

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http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/15/fallin-signs-banonminimumwageincrease.html

Many Oklahomans are barely educated and semi-literate, if that. Single motherhood is common, and in most of the state (ie, outside of Oklahoma City and maybe Tulsa) there are few jobs, and what jobs exist pay minimum wage. Even factoring in the lower costs of living in Oklahoma (as opposed to say California), most people barely make it. IOW, it's fertile ground for radical conservatism. I've always found it odd that in America, the poor are conservative, while in most of the rest of the world, the poor are leftist bordering on outright communism in many places. America's poor don't seem to mind being paid peanuts; there hasn't been much support for workers' rights in decades, and union participation is in the single digits percentagewise. Unions are hated by the poor to the extent that the unions have had to resort to sleight of hand to get people to join, with schemes like "card check". There's little question that OK's ban is ideologically motivated, and that the guv's base simply doesn't care.

It's just a waste of time because who cares?
Why waste time worrying about what some small city does? This is just ridiculous. I cannot believe the kind of tripe people are willing to waste their time on in this state.
There are poor people but let's not forget there are a lot of Indians who make money off casinos, energy industry which has done well the past number of years except one company which shall remain nameless which was practically run into the ground by one of it's CEOs. Mexican drug cartels launder millions of dollars here, too.
As for being poor and illiterate, New Mexico is worse.
The problem with many in Oklahoma is they cannot understand how to prosper. They don't understand that without government and debt, it's much harder to prosper. You need debt to make money. Many people here do not grasp complicated finances. They think putting penny in jars over the course of a lifetime is the way to build wealth and they run the state on a put-the-penny-in-the-jar philosophy.

The Texas legislature passed a bunch of laws specifically aimed at suppressing Austin environmentalists about a decade ago. Then they changed the congressional districts to divide the city into three districts because the voters in Austin kept electing a person from the other party to Congress. Haters love this stuff.

The justification for keeping cities from raising the minimum wage is to keep Oklahoma economically viable. Being economically viable means everyone, including labor, gets a bigger piece of the pie - but then, wages are kept low, which means workers are kept poor, so...
Am I missing something here?

Actually you sound just like the folks that yelled, "if you just vote for right to work you'll see the state will prosper."
Well it takes much more than that for Oklahoma to prosper because voting for right to work did absolutely nothing to bring more jobs to this state.

Evidence of how simple some people are in this state...they run ads with a family of three or four people, well, mostly just a man and woman, tsking and shaking their head and the woman looks hopeless and says, "We stay on a budget each month. Shouldn't our government do the same?"
Again, it's failure to grasp big finance. Their small household cannot compare to state or federal government or even a large corporation, for that matter, and there are plenty of examples where people have prospered and done so big time thanks to government, like with the defense spending and all these defense contractors in DC raked in large amounts of money on these wars. See, they don't get that here.

It's far better for our politicians to fight for Oklahoma's piece of the pie, not be dictated to by people with limited grasp of reality in this state. When they vote for US Senate and House vacancies, it's not with the hope whomever they vote in will do things for our state, like bring in some of that federal money. It's more about who can they get who will deprive this state the most and do absolutely nothing but piss and moan the entire duration of their term. It's really sad seeing a state so hell bent on suffering, poverty, doing without, and just being in a near constant state of peevish, irritability and deprivation and yet not wanting to do anything to improve their lot in life, just try to drag as many people down into the quick sand right along with them assuming the world wants to be that miserable and you can only be happy in a state of misery. The mindset is not an optimistic, happy-go-lucky, confidence of the risk taking financial genius, rather the miserable, miserly but with very little to put away, peevish, angry. nagging. hopeless curmudgeon. If only I could make them see their lives could be so much better. There's no pride in destitution.

Others comment Oklahoma seems so backward and illiterate it's because, every year, the ones who thrive academically in high school leave the state and go elsewhere since they cannot put their minds to adequate use here and they get so sick and tired of people's negative attitudes which basically equates to them having nothing to do so they see it as boring and dumb compared to other states. Oklahoma is it's own worst enemy a lot of the time. So yeah, there are bright people who are really brilliant in high school they just leave as soon as they can. In Oklahoma, the dim witted are allowed to be in charge so the intelligent ones bail as soon as they can.

You act like Oklahoma wasn't always a dusty, meth-riddled pit of despair. (Yes, I have lived there before)

I see nothing wrong with it.

Cities do not have the authority to enact certain laws.

Laramie, WY wanted to pass a "hate crime" law after Matthew Shepard was murdered. It failed to pass for several reasons, but one was that the city had no legal authority to create a law punishable by imprisonment. Cities and counties can pass ordinances which may lead to a fine or even regulate certain actions within their borders, but they can't make up laws defining crimes not recognized by the rest of the state.

"Minimum wage" is a state issue, not a locality one. Most localities pay more than minimum wage because of supply and demand, not because there is a local mandate of law. If a state or county tried to enforce a local minimum wage law that contradicts the standard of state law, it would fail because state law trumps local law.

Actually, I don't know much about Oklahoma, save for what I saw in The Grapes Of Wrath. That, and how during the dust bowl, a lot of Okies had ended up here in Washington.

Actually here in Washington, Seattle did in fact raise the minimum wage in their city limits just the other say.

Many very successful people would care to disagree.

A lot of those "successful" people only have wealth because of debt.

And even more only have wealth because of the government. That's just reality. Deal with it and use it to your advantage instead of just sitting there complaining and trying to ruin it for others. Why not?

Without debt most of our financial system would collapse. Sorry people cannot deal with reality but it is what it is. Learn about it instead of just sitting there whining about something you know very little of and choose to be ignorant about.

So it's ok if a state wants to fight federal laws on the basis of local needs, but it not ok for cities to do the same?

She is so ignorant about minimum wage. As a matter of fact, you used to be able to live off minimum wage and now you can't anymore because costs went up and so did inflation and minimum wage didn't keep up with it and most minimum wage workers are not teens or college students.