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Tag: right wing ideology
Why The Right Should Support Boosting Minimum Wage, Too

Why The Right Should Support Boosting Minimum Wage, Too

I’ve heard a lot of goofy arguments against raising the federal minimum wage. The silliest goes like this: “You want to raise the minimum wage to $15? Why not $50? Why not $100?”

Of course, that’s not a real argument. Yet I hear it a lot, which means it probably originates somewhere in the nation’s vast menagerie of conservative talk-show hosts.

The answer, if this pseudo-argument deserves one, is that $15 is at least where the current minimum hourly wage of $7.25 would be if it had kept up with worker productivity since the 1960s, according to various experts.

For example, the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimates that, if the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity growth since 1968, as it did for the two decades before, it would now be $18.67 per hour. Ah, the good old days.

That figure makes President Barack Obama’s request for a raise to $10.10, after asking for $9 earlier in the year, sound modest.

Yet at the other end of the political spectrum you have conservatives like Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, who told National Journal that he would rather just get rid of the federal minimum wage altogether. “I think it’s outlived its usefulness,” he said, although he acknowledged that “it may have been of some value back in the Great Depression.”

No minimum wage? It seems to me that America tried that before. It’s called slavery.

But whether Barton’s fellow Republicans share his extreme view or not, a minimum wage increase isn’t likely to have any easier time in the current Congress than most of this president’s other requests.

That’s a tragedy for millions of hard-working Americans who are having an increasingly tough time making ends meet — even as stocks soar to record highs on Wall Street.

Does it sound like I’m talking class warfare? Americans didn’t think so in the three decades after World War II, when the idea of wages keeping up with productivity had much more bipartisan support.

In the years from 1947 to 1969, the minimum wage actually did keep pace with productivity growth, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, another liberal-leaning Washington think tank. As recently as President George W. Bush’s administration, Congress passed a bipartisan minimum wage increase in 2007 that included tax breaks for small businesses. That’s not class warfare. It’s legislating.

Yet not all conservatives are opposed to raising the minimum wage. While Washington sounds gridlocked, the issue has produced productive alliances in various states and municipalities.

In California, fast-food workers and others who have been rallying nationwide for minimum wage increases, have found an unusual ally in Ron Unz. The conservative Silicon Valley businessman probably is best known for backing Proposition 227 in 1998, a ballot issue that eliminated bilingual education as it had been practiced in California schools.

Now the former publisher of The American Conservative magazine has submitted a ballot initiative to the California secretary of state that would raise the state minimum wage to $12 an hour in 2016 from the current $8.

His reasons? Strictly conservative, he points out. He sees it as an economic growth measure. It would put $15 billion a year into the pockets of workers who would spend it as “one of the largest economic stimulus packages in California history,” he told KQED radio. And it would be funded entirely by the private sector, he pointed out.

More controversially, Unz hopes that raising the minimum wage would help slow the flow of illegal immigration. “In effect, a much higher minimum wage serves to remove the lowest rungs in the employment ladder,” he wrote in the magazine he used to publish, “thus preventing newly arrived immigrants from gaining their initial foothold in the economy.”

That may be asking too much, in my view. History shows that immigration, legal or illegal, rises or falls according to how well the U.S. economy is doing.

But there’s no question that raising wages would make work in this country even more attractive, particularly to Americans who already toil on the bottom rungs of the income ladder. They deserve a raise.

(Email Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com)

Photo: Joe Lustri via Flickr

Windbag Damage: Tea Party Republicans And The Hurricane

Whether natural or manmade, extreme events often tell us something important about human beings, revealing their priorities and reflecting their character. So it was with Hurricane Irene, which allowed certain prominent proponents of right-wing ideology to expose themselves in full.

Irene happily turned out to be an event far less extreme than expected, at least so far as most of the East Coast was concerned. But nobody could be sure of that until Monday afternoon. So while millions of people still had reason to fear much worse, two of the leading Republicans in Congress sought to use the approaching hurricane for their own partisan and ideological purposes — and exposed just how little they care about the suffering of Americans who might be unlucky enough to be struck by disaster.

It was an object lesson in what we can expect from the right in power — and an irritating reminder of how badly conservative government failed six years ago when Hurricane Katrina struck.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor set the tone earlier in the week, when he issued a statement following the 5.8 magnitude earthquake that sent tremors northward hundreds of miles from Richmond, VA — the state’s capital and his hometown. Always more eager to display ideology than compassion, Cantor told reporters during a tour of the quake’s damage in his district “the problem is that people in Virginia don’t have earthquake insurance.” Of course, earthquake damage is exceedingly rare in the East, so most homeowner policies don’t include such coverage (as any insurance expert could have informed Cantor). To him “the problem” is not that his constituents suffered unforeseeable destruction and needed relief, but that they were not sufficiently clairvoyant to buy protection in the private sector.

Then Cantor insisted that before Congress approves any federal support for the earthquake’s victims — a category of aid usually approved quickly and without debate — there will have to be cuts elsewhere in the budget. Last spring he made the same egregious demand, after a series of record-breaking tornadoes ripped through the Midwest and South, killing hundreds of people and inflicting billions of dollars in damage. Holding disaster victims hostage to his agenda of cutting Medicare and Social Security is simply legislative strategy to Cantor, presumably because he feels that they merit no assistance if they didn’t insure themselves in advance.

Only days after the earthquake, however, Cantor signed a letter from the entire Virginia Congressional delegation to President Obama, asking him to issue a federal disaster declaration for their state in anticipation of the oncoming hurricane. Such a presidential directive, said the letter, “would ensure the full partnership and resources of the federal government to support the commonwealth’s efforts to ensure the public’s safety and quick recovery from the direct and indirect effects of Hurricane Irene.” So in the final days before the hurricane struck, even callous Cantor got worried about its potential effects on his district — and wanted the federal government to commit resources in advance for its recovery. This time he forgot to demand any budget cuts to offset such spending, which suggests that he is hypocritical as well as mean.

Then came Ron Paul, the Texas Congressman and persistent presidential wannabe, who laughed when asked on Fox News whether the government ought to help hurricane victims. “Where would the money come from?” he chortled. “I have precise beliefs in [sic] what we should do and I want to transition out of dependency on the federal government.”

Even more extreme than Cantor, Paul said he believes that we cannot afford to assist anyone injured or ruined by natural disasters, and that the nation would be better off without any federal relief efforts (and without environmental protections of any kind, or any regulation of the safety of food, pharmaceuticals, consumer products or transportation).

“We should be like 1900,” Paul said, without mentioning how brutish, dangerous and short life tended to be for most Americans back then.

To insist that we must revert to a more primitive and predatory way of life may well be Republican dogma these days, but it isn’t the ideal of America that most citizens have cherished for the past century or so. The coming elections will test whether traditional standards of community and decency — in other words, our national character — can survive the advent of the Tea Party.