Sarah Palin weighs in on the minimum wage debate. As ignorantly as possible.

The above graphic was found on Palin's Facebook page.

Of course the comparison is somewhat misleading because though base pay for an E1 Recruit can be as low as $16,168 a year, there are other monetary compensations such as a housing allowance, hardship duty pay, assignment incentive pay,  hazardous duty incentive pay, and hostile fire/imminent danger pay.

Not to mention that a recruit essentially enters the military as an unskilled worker whose room and board is provided for him as he learns the skills necessary to achieve competency in his job.

I have never heard of McDonald's letting their fry cooks sleep in the restaurant at night and eat for free.

However let me simply say that I think that those in the  military deserve a pay raise as well. (They also deserve to not have their paychecks interfered with, a fact that did not seem to bother Palin and her fellow Teabaggers when they shut the government down for two weeks earlier this year.) Yet the fact that they do not yet have one does nothing to change the fact that people are underpaid in this country, in a variety of occupations, and that our country's economy would be dramatically improved if they were paid a more reasonable wage.

So this graphic may make conservatives, and Sarah Palin, feel justified in arguing against paying low wage earners more money, but all it really does is demonstrate that there are many lines of work where the compensation is inadequate.

But hey at least Palin did not slap a SarahPAC logo on the graphic so that she could benefit momentarily from the soldiers who she claims to support. Small favors and all that.