“An Issue People Understand”: What Republicans Don’t Get About The Minimum Wage
Republicans don’t like talking about the minimum wage, which is only natural given that their position is one that is extremely unpopular (raising the minimum to $10.10 an hour, the level advocated by Democrats, regularly polls at 70 percent or more). But while their political problem on the issue stems from their policy stance, the way they do talk about it, when they absolutely have to, makes the problem worse. Witness what New Jersey governor and likely presidential candidate Chris Christie now has to say about it:
“I’m tired of hearing about the minimum wage,” Christie said in a keynote speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “I really am. I don’t think there’s a mother or a father sitting around the kitchen table tonight in America saying, ‘You know, honey, if our son or daughter could just make a higher minimum wage, my God, all of our dreams would be realized.’ “
“Is that what parents aspire to for our children?” Christie continued, “They aspire to a greater, growing America, where their children have the ability to make much more money and have much great success than they have, and that’s not about a higher minimum wage.”
That is some weird logic. We need to keep the minimum wage low, because everybody wants to make a lot more than minimum wage, and an increase won’t make anyone’s dreams come true. It’s kind of like saying to a hungry person: “I could give you a sandwich, but I know what you’d really love is an eight-course meal at the Four Seasons. So no sandwich.” Or saying to the public: “It would be great if we could magically eliminate 100 percent of crime, but since we can’t, we’re not going to bother to have a police force.”
Christie’s exasperation is no doubt widely shared among Republicans. They just can’t seem to grasp why anyone would care about the minimum wage. No matter how many times you explain to them that it isn’t just teenage kids working their after-school jobs who make it, but people trying to raise families (the Economic Policy Institute estimates that increasing the minimum wage would directly or indirectly give a raise to 27.8 million American workers), that fact just doesn’t register.
I could make a conjecture about the psychological underpinnings of that, which would have something to do with the natural contempt many on the right feel for people who are economically struggling. But let’s look at what Florida governor Rick Scott said in a debate last night:
Q: Do you support the concept of a minimum wage?
Scott: Sure.
Q: What should it be?
Scott: How would I know? The private sector decides wages.
Right, and the point of a minimum wage is that the government is setting the minimum, because we have collectively decided what the minimum should be. Either you think there ought to be a minimum wage, or you think the private sector should decide the minimum. You can’t believe in both.
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker got asked the same question last week. “I’m not going to repeal it,” he said. “But I don’t think it serves a purpose because we’re debating then about what the lowest levels are at. I want people to make, like I said the other night, two or three times that.”
I suppose this is now the standard Republican dodge to questions about the minimum wage — we shouldn’t raise it, because it would be even better if people made more! — and it’s so transparently dumb that even voters can see through it. For her part, Walker’s opponent Mary Burke has been pushing the issue hard ever since Walker ran into trouble on it, and the race is currently close to tied.
There’s no question that Republicans aren’t helped by the simple fact that this is an issue people understand and have clear ideas about, and most voters are at odds with the GOP position. But the Republicans’ scorn for the idea that anyone cares about raising the minimum wage seems particularly misguided, given that the GOP is already widely seen as the party of the rich.
This year there are initiatives to raise the minimum wage on five state ballots, including three — Arkansas, Alaska, and South Dakota — where there are close Senate races. Because the federal minimum wage was last increased in 2009 and its value erodes every year, there has been tremendous momentum to increase it at the state and local level. In 2014 alone, bills to increase the minimum wage have been introduced in 34 states, and increases have been enacted in 10 states plus D.C. Minimum wage initiatives that appear on the ballot almost always win. If nobody cared about what the minimum wage is, that wouldn’t be the case. You’d think by now Republicans would have figured that out.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 22, 2014
“Bullets Outweigh Ballots”: Joni Ernst And The Right To Revolutionary Violence
The picture of IA GOP SEN nominee Joni Ernst that’s emerging from exposure of her pre-2014-general-election utterances is of a standard-brand Constitutional Conservative embracing all the strange and controversial tenets of that creed. There’s Agenda 21 madness. There’s Personhood advocacy. There are attacks on the entire New Deal/Great Society legacy–and perhaps even agricultural programs–as creating “dependency.” And now, inevitably, there’s the crown jewel of Con Con extremism: the belief that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to enable “patriots” to violently overthrow the government if in their opinion it’s overstepped its constitutional boundaries. Sam Levine of HuffPost has that story:
Joni Ernst, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Iowa, said during an NRA event in 2012 that she would use a gun to defend herself from the government.
“I have a beautiful little Smith & Wesson, 9 millimeter, and it goes with me virtually everywhere,” Ernst said at the NRA and Iowa Firearms Coalition Second Amendment Rally in Searsboro, Iowa. “But I do believe in the right to carry, and I believe in the right to defend myself and my family — whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.”
Now this is a guaranteed applause line among Con Con audiences, for reasons that have relatively little to do with gun regulation. The idea here is to intimidate liberals, and “looters” and secular socialists, and those people, that there are limits to what the good virtuous folk of the country will put up with in the way of interference with their property rights and their religious convictions and their sense of how the world ought to work. If push comes to shove, they’re heavily armed, and bullets outweigh ballots. It’s a reminder that if politics fails in protecting their very broad notion of their “rights,” then revolutionary violence–which after all, made this great country possible in the first place–is always an option. And if that sounds “anti-democratic,” well, as the John Birch Society has always maintained, this is a Republic, not a democracy.
This stuff is entirely consistent with everything we’ve been learning about how Joni Ernst talked before she won a Senate nomination and decided upon an aggressively non-substantive message based on her identity and biography and one stupid but apparently irresistible joke comparing the kind of treatment she’ll give to the pork purveyors of Washington (presumably those who support obvious waste like food stamps and Medicaid) to hog castratin.’ Issues are absolute kryptonite to her campaign, so it’s no surprise she’s decided abruptly to cancel all meetings with editorial boards between now and November 4, according to Des Moines Register columnist Rekha Basu:
Is Joni Ernst afraid of newspaper editorial boards? After much negotiating, she was scheduled to meet his morning with writers and editors at The Des Moines Register, but last night her people called to unilaterally cancel. She has also begged off meetings with The Cedar Rapids Gazette and The Dubuque Telegraph-Herald.
Is Ernst that sensitive to the kinds of criticisms that invariably will come in such a high profile U.S. Senate race? Is she afraid of the scrutiny? Sure, it’s stressful, but all the other candidates for Congress are doing it to get their messages out, including Steven King, the target of frequent editorial criticism.
Maybe Ernst’s cynicism will be justified by the results, but I dunno: Iowans are pretty old-school about this kind of thing, and the Register actually influences votes, probably more than any newspaper I can think of. If she does win, nobody in Iowa has any excuse to be surprised if she turns out to be Todd Akin or Sharron Angle with better message discipline. As I said in another post recently, that’s pretty much who she is. Knowing she’s played the “I have the right to overthrow the government with my gun” meme makes that even clearer.
Still, somebody should ask Joni Ernst: “Since you brought it up, exactly what circumstances would justify you shooting a police officer or a soldier in the head?” Oh yeah: that would require her taking questions, which I doubt we’ll see in the last days of this campaign.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, October 22, 2014
“Bad Politics And Worse Policy”: GOP’s Minimum Wage Disaster; How Chris Christie And Scott Walker Are Stepping In It
Buoyed by surveys showing that voters overwhelmingly support raising the federal minimum wage, Democrats have held Republicans’ feet to the fire this year, pressing GOP candidates and officeholders to take clear stands on the issue. Most have — and they’re overwhelmingly opposed to raising the federal wage above its current level of $7.25 an hour. And as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie attest, it’s exceedingly difficult for Republicans to discuss the issue without sounding both callous and clueless.
Christie’s minimum wage flub came today — during a speech before a well-heeled crowd at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, no less. “I’m tired of hearing about the minimum wage,” Christie said, according to The Hill. “I really am. I don’t think there’s a mother or a father sitting around the kitchen table tonight in America saying, ‘You know, honey, if our son or daughter could just make a higher minimum wage, my God, all of our dreams would be realized.’”
“Is that what parents aspire to for our children? They aspire to a greater, growing America where their children have the ability to make much more money and have much greater success than they have and that’s not about a higher minimum wage,” Christie added.
Set aside for a moment the fact that a dismal labor market leaves many workers with no choice but to take minimum wage jobs. It’s true, as Christie argues, that most parents aspire to far more for their children. But in a socially stratified America with limited upward mobility, that’s an argument for measures to redistribute wealth and opportunity and to invest in disadvantaged communities with increased education funding, public works projects, and the like. Don’t look for a GOP conservative like Christie to endorse such policies.
Then there’s Walker, who faces a tough reelection battle in Wisconsin against Democrat Mary Burke. Earlier this month, Walker’s administration rebuffed a workers coalition’s effort to raise the state’s minimum wage in accordance with a state law that calls for the minimum to be a “living wage.” The administration responded to their effort by asserting that $7.25 an hour is a living wage — even though MIT calculates that a single parent would need to earn $21.17 an hour to make a living wage in the state capital of Madison. But don’t bother Walker with such figures. The minimum wage, he asserted last week, doesn’t even “serve a purpose,” explaining that he’d rather help Wisconsinites secure higher-paying jobs than the raise the minimum wage. OK, but what about the 500,000 workers in the state who’d see a raise if the minimum wage went from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour?
The GOP, it seems, is functionally incapable of talking about the minimum wage without botching basic facts or seeming downright insensitive. No, minimum wage hikes don’t kill job growth, and no, Joni Ernst, most minimum wage earners aren’t high school students who just need a little “starter wage.” The callousness caucus, though, will hear none of it.
By: Like Brinker, Deputy Politics Editor, Salon, October 22, 2014
“Inequality Starts In The Crib”: The United States Is Not A Meritocracy
The entire conservative ideological program on economics depends on cosmic justice: the idea that those who develop talent and work hard will succeed as they deserve, while those who are lazy and without skills will fail as they ought. That meritocratic concept is the justification for slashing all forms of assistance to the poor and the middle class from food stamps to healthcare. Further, if the rich got there by just deserts, then they should get even more money to keep being so productive for everyone else.
But if it turns out that there is no meritocracy–if the rich get there through privilege and luck rather than industry and talent–then the entire rest of the conservative agenda morally falls apart.
It just so happens that a new study shows that the United States does not, in fact, have a meritocracy:
America is the land of opportunity, just for some more than others. That’s because, in large part, inequality starts in the crib. Rich parents can afford to spend more time and money on their kids, and that gap has only grown the past few decades. Indeed, economists Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane calculate that, between 1972 and 2006, high-income parents increased their spending on “enrichment activities” for their children by 151 percent in inflation-adjusted terms, compared to 57 percent for low-income parents….
Even poor kids who do everything right don’t do much better than rich kids who do everything wrong. Advantages and disadvantages, in other words, tend to perpetuate themselves. You can see that in the above chart, based on a new paper from Richard Reeves and Isabel Sawhill, presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s annual conference, which is underway.
Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, respectively. Not only that, but these low-income strivers are just as likely to end up in the bottom as these wealthy ne’er-do-wells. Some meritocracy.
What’s going on? Well, it’s all about glass floors and glass ceilings. Rich kids who can go work for the family business — and, in Canada at least, 70 percent of the sons of the top 1 percent do just that — or inherit the family estate don’t need a high school diploma to get ahead. It’s an extreme example of what economists call “opportunity hoarding.” That includes everything from legacy college admissions to unpaid internships that let affluent parents rig the game a little more in their children’s favor.
But even if they didn’t, low-income kids would still have a hard time getting ahead. That’s, in part, because they’re targets for diploma mills that load them up with debt, but not a lot of prospects. And even if they do get a good degree, at least when it comes to black families, they’re more likely to still live in impoverished neighborhoods that keep them disconnected from opportunities.
Everything about the conservative economic agenda is wrong not only on the merits (supply-side economics is a proven logistical failure, for instance), but from its very philosophical underpinnings.
There is no meritocracy. The rich do not get ahead by their industry and talent, but by luck and connections. It’s more about who you know, than what you know. Which means that anyone defending the right of the rich to take even more money is exalting a system as indefensible as the divine right of kings.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, October 20, 2014
“Real Improvements In People’s Lives”: John Kasich’s Unforgivable Truth About Obamacare
When we Washington types sit around and handicap the GOP field for 2016, we tend to talk about the known quantities, the people prancing around before us on a daily basis thrusting their elbows in one another’s general direction, your Pauls and Cruzes and Perrys and so on. Then Bush and Christie are mentioned. Eventually, though, some clever person shyly pipes up: “You know, keep one eye on John Kasich.”
And everyone thinks, “Yes, that’s smart.” Because Kasich is the governor of the echt-purple state, Ohio. Because he’s popular, and he’s cruising to reelection. Because his association with some of the party’s batshittier positions is remote. Because governors are usually better candidates than senators anyway.
Always has made a lot of sense to me. But yesterday, the case for Kasich got harder by dint of the governor’s electorally unfathomable and instantly controversial remarks about Obamacare. Campaigning Monday, Kasich told the Associated Press that a full repeal of the hated law is “not gonna happen.” And then he said this: “The opposition to it was really either political or ideological. I don’t think that holds water against real flesh and blood, and real improvements in people’s lives.”
A Republican governor with presidential aspirations acknowledging that Obamacare is improving people’s lives is akin to…well, for starters, a Democratic governor with presidential aspirations saying the Iraq War was a dandy idea. An astonishing statement. His press aides quickly scrambled to explain that Kasich still wants to repeal and replace the law and emphasized that they were seeking some kind of correction from the AP, allegedly on the grounds that the “it” in Kasich’s quote might have meant only the Medicaid expansion, not the entire Obamacare law. [Update: Yes, it would appear that the “it” was just the Medicaid expansion, and the AP has now changed their report to reflect this. Kasich’s press aide Rob Nichols called me Tuesday morning to say: “Absolutely no news was broken yesterday.”]
Be that as it may, stuffing this cat back in this bag probably can’t be done. The quote is out there now. Flesh and blood improvements in people’s lives! Via Barack Obama.
Intense partisans on both sides make up their minds about politicians less on intellectual or policy-substantive bases than on what we in the pundit trade call “affective” ones—having to do with their emotional responses, how a candidate or a situation makes them feel. It’s true as I say on both sides, but it’s much truer on the right these days than on the left, because the right-wing base has real power over Republican politicians, whereas the left base doesn’t have remotely that kind of power to frighten Democratic pols. If a Democrat angers the left, he or she will likely survive it except over one or two issues (the aforementioned Iraq War), and indeed is likelier than not to end up prospering from having done so (the Sister Souljah paradigm).
If a Republican enrages the right, though, he’s cooked. And it can be the smallest and most symbolic thing. Charlie Crist got thrown out of the party for one hug, after all. Mitt Romney was never the base’s favorite, of course, and neither was John McCain. But you’ll notice that when each was the party’s nominee, neither whispered a syllable that would risk offending the base. McCain elevated Sarah Palin. Romney finally adopted some slightly more centrist-seeming positions during the first debate, but he was extremely clever about that, because in doing so, he confounded the media, which were aghast at his sudden reversals of position. So in other words, the base forgave him for the crime of moving to the center because he did it in a way that made the media mad, which pleased the base voters more than his shifts displeased them.
So, back to Kasich. It was one thing to take the Medicaid money. He was one of nine Republican governors to do so, so he had company there. But there’s a right way and wrong way for a Republican governor to accept the Medicaid money. You take the Medicaid money by still complaining about the law and denouncing it, lying that your hands were tied or something like that. You don’t take it by saying it’s actually good.
But Kasich on this point was already in trouble with conservatives, because he took the money a year ago in what conservatives in the Buckeye State thought was a really shifty way. He went around the GOP-controlled state legislature, which opposed the expansion, and won a 5-2 vote on a state Controlling Board whose authority even to make such a decision was questioned at the time by conservatives. Kasich had, in the run-up to the vote, traveled the state campaigning to accept the money, even occasionally making (are you sitting down?) moral arguments in favor of helping the poor.
So all that was known. But none of it was a sound-bite like this. The obvious implication here for 2016 is that, as president, he would not seek to repeal the law, even though he still insists otherwise. So picture the GOP candidate debates of late 2015. They will be asked if they’re going to repeal all of Obamacare. Yes, the rest will thunder! But Kasich will perform some meek tap dance about repeal and replace, leaving the good parts. Good parts?! To GOP primary voters?
Well, he’ll certainly stand out from the field. And who knows. Maybe the 2016 GOP will decide that this sin is forgivable. The urge to beat Hillary Clinton will be fierce, and if the polls say Kasich can do it, then maybe voters will cut him the necessary slack. But that would be a very different electorate from the one we’ve known. My thought for now: Move that eye you were keeping on Kasich over to Indiana’s Mike Pence.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 21, 2014
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