Ending Poverty In America

I watched the Democratic National Committee debate, which was held before their recent election for the new Chair. The old Chair was forced out by scandal because she corruptly passed the debate questions to Hillary so she could appear smarter than Trump.

(Curiously, not one candidate for Chair had one word to say about that ugly recent history. No mea culpas. No acknowledgement of the damage that their unethical actions had done to their brand. No attempt to ask for forgiveness. This is a foolish move. America is a very forgiving nation, but you have to ask for it. Heck, we have had TV mega-preachers caught with an arm-full of hookers and a nose-full of blow. Those jokers simply confessed that they were “weak sinners”, asked to be forgiven, did two weeks “retreat”, spoke deeply and meaningfully with their religious advisors and kept on preaching. To do that, though, you have to confess and ask for forgiveness, and foolishly the Democrats never did … but I digress …)

I was also amused by the fact that most of the hopefuls spoke of one thing and one thing only—their hatred of Trump. Each speaker tried to outdo the last at being the most anti-Trumpiest candidate of all, the quintessential Trump-hater. By the end of the evening, there was nothing even vaguely Trumpish which had not been roundly and severely denounced as being evil and downright-unAmerican.

The atmosphere was like what I always imagined as a teenager when I read George Orwell’s 1984, about the “Two Minutes Hate”. Here’s the updated quote, viz:

The program of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein Trump was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against
the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations,
sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still
alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea,
under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even–so it was
occasionally rumoured–in some hiding-place in Oceania Russia itself.

At times, I feared that the amount of virtue in the room would overcome the air conditioning and lead to random outbreaks of auto-adulation. As they say, it’s not the heat … it’s the humility …

I was amazed at the vitriol, the bitterness, the hatred, the bile of the hopeful candidates, but the bigger the accusation, the more the debate audience loved it, whooping and hollering at each accusation. Here’s Orwell again, an apt description of the response to the Two Minutes Trump Hate:

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

Well, not quite that bad, don’t know about kill or torture, but the desire to punch Trump or his supporters in the face runs deep on the left and was clearly expressed in that crowd.

The election was eventually won by the Clinton/Obama candidate, Tom Perez, rather than the Sanders/Warren candidate, Keith Ellison. Didn’t matter much, Perez named Ellison as Deputy Chair.

Curious about Perez’s policies, I looked him up. Among other things, he supports eventually raising the Federal minimum wage over the next few years to $15 per hour. Here’s a few quotes from Perez about the question:

Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 will benefit about 28 million workers across the country. And it will help businesses, too – raising the wage will put more money in people’s pockets, which they will pump back into the economy by spending it on goods and services in their communities.

and

Raising the minimum wage isn’t just pro-worker; it’s pro-economic growth.

and

President Obama believes that income inequality is one of the most pressing matters facing the nation. If we are going to be a country that provides ladders of opportunity and believes in a thriving middle class, then we have to raise the minimum wage.

Given those huge benefits of a rise in the minimum wage to ten dollars per hour to the poor, the middle class, businesses, and the economy as a whole, I can see why DNC Chair Perez wants to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour. Obviously, if what he says is true, raising the minimum wage higher than ten bucks an hour would benefit even more workers than the twenty-eight million he cited.

Plus if raising the minimum wage to ten an hour helps businesses, it would clearly help businesses even more to raise it to fifteen dollars per hour.

And this in turn reminded me of my proposal to end American poverty forever that I came up with a few years ago. I hadn’t realized just how simple it would be to bring everyone up to not just a decent but a comfortable standard of living. I mean, it’s the 21st century, hard-working Americans should all be at least comfortable. Here’s my truly brilliant scheme to aid the poor, the middle class, businesses, and the economy itself:

=====================================================
Raise the minimum wage to $75 per hour.
=====================================================

I mean, think about it. First off, it means that every working person in America would be making at least $75 per hour. Talk about helping millions of workers! Most people make less than seventy-five an hour, it would help all of them. Everyone in the US, even the janitors and the kids at McDonalds, will be earning at least $150,000 per year.

Of course, that $75 per hour is money which those previously poor folks will, what was it … oh, right, “pump back into the economy by spending it on goods and services”. Just think about how pumping those millions and millions of dollars into the economy will help the businesses! People will have so much spending money, the businesses will laugh all the way to the bank. Consumer demand will go through the roof.

And as to helping the economy, if the previously poor are making $150,000 per year, then imagine what the middle class will be making. All we have to do is to climb up Obama’s “ladder of opportunity” and it will boost the middle class and lift the entire economy!

…

…

…

…

…

… now, if you understand the problem with my brilliant plan, if you can see why this method cannot possibly work … then you need to admit that the exact same argument applies to ANY minimum wage, even a very low one.

And if you don’t understand the problem with my brilliant plan, then you might be a liberal.

The issue, of course, is that regardless of what the law says, in the real-world marketplace of labor there are some people who are only worth six bucks an hour, or nine bucks an hour, or three bucks an hour. I wrote elsewhere about how on my first job as a teenager I made a quarter of the minimum wage. Why?

Because that was all I was worth.

The real minimum wage, of course, is zero. If we set the minimum wage at $15 per hour as Tom Perez and the Democrats argue, everyone who is not worth $15 per hour in the marketplace will be out of a job … and as a result they will make the real minimum wage, $0.00 per hour.

The minimum wage law does not create any wealth. Instead, all the minimum wage law does is redistribute the amount of money spent on wages. It removes money from less skilled lower-paid workers and puts the money toward more skilled higher-paid workers … while increasing the pressure for automation at the bottom end.

So here’s the Perez plan, the Democratic Party’s plan. Take money away from the lowest-paid worker, give that money to the higher-paid workers, push automation (think hamburger-making machines), and pretend that the redistribution of wealth is a net gain for the economy …

Have I mentioned how happy I am to have a President who understands that we can’t redistribute our way out of the economic hole we’re in? America dodged a big bullet …

All the best to all the best,

w.

PS: Could everyone please QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU ARE DISCUSSING, so that we can all understand what you are discussing.