The Wages are Too Damn High

I couldn't blog last night about the debates because they literally took a melon-baller to my cranium. Two GOP debates is a kind of brutality. Things like listening to Chris Christie's baseless assertion that Hillary Clinton was coming for anyone's wallet or just pretending that Ben Carson can make any statement regarding foreign policy that actually makes sense in any world whatsoever are patience-exhausting.

But check the tone right from the top of the main card debate--Trump on the minimum wage. Wages are too high. He would not raise the minimum wage. Just last debate, Carly Fiorina said that she believed that a minimum wage was actually unconstitutional. Donald Trump reiterated his position earlier today regarding wages being too high.

This is bullshit. This is the ugliest and dumbest level of bullshit and anyone who thinks America can be great when we are actually bidding to lower the standard of living for American workers is foolish. We want to compete with third-world nations in providing low-income workers?

Let me restate that--we want our elites to sell our labor to corporations for bottom-dollar prices?

Hey rubes! The Donald wants to lower your salary to make the rich people in America great again, get it?

Rags-to-riches pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson also thinks the minimum wage is bad news. He thinks that raising the minimum wage will lead to unemployment--but that just isn't true! When wages go up, people buy stuff. They put that money back into the economy and everyone benefits.

Think about what the minimum wage is. It's a floor. You don't make lower than x amount per hour. Our present federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. That's about half what a living wage would be. But almost half of all American workers make less than $15 an hour. That's barely enough to make rent on or to build a savings on. But Trump says it's too high, and Carly Fiorina thinks there should be no floor.

Well, why not offer $3 an hour if someone out there, like a homeless person, will work for it? Why not a dollar? Why not a spot on the floor to sleep on and a bare minimum amount of food to keep one's new chattel-dependent sort-of alive while they ply however many hours their employer needs them for?

We had a set-up like that in this country, and fought a war and mostly decided that set-up was immoral, and Ben Carson basically compares everything he doesn't like to that set-up, but maybe he doesn't get that he sort of is signing off on that set-up a little.

This isn't an economic formula for "greatness". It's not even human. It's "How to Serve Man"--the cookbook. Eat this, you bastards.