Republicans Would Like Your Vote. They Promise Not to Raise Your Wages.
Attention, American voters: make the right choice in 2016. Elect the candidate from the party the firmly vows not to raise your wages. Uhhhhhh.
We don’t like to engage in the dreaded “horse race journalism” that obsessively tracks the political pluses and minuses of every policy statement rather than analyzing the rightness or wrongness of the actual policies. That said, allow me to engage in this practice for a very brief moment. I am no “professional political pollster” but it seems to me that going on record promising not to give voters a substantial raise in the minimum wage is an odd way to convince voters to vote for you.
Yesterday, the Fight for 15 movement staged a day of nationwide protests and walkouts to lobby for a $15 minimum wage. Also yesterday, New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced that he would raise the minimum wage to $15 for all state employees. It was another victory for a campaign that has, against high odds, pulled off a string of such victories in cities and states across the country. And it earned its very own question at the start of the Republican debate last night, when the moderator asked several candidates how they felt about raising the federal minimum wage—which currently stands at a paltry $7.25 per hour—to $15 an hour.
Let us put this in the proper political context: these candidates are all running for president. They will be running against a Democrat. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders supports a $15 minimum wage, and Hillary Clinton has voiced support for a minimum wage around $12, and Barack Obama has been trying on his watch to raise the wage to $10.10. This is the mainstream range of opinions of the party that Republicans will be running against next year. Furthermore, economic inequality has been on the rise in America for decades, we’re still staggering our way out of the Great Recession, wages for most workers are hopelessly stagnated, and the federal minimum wage has not been raised for six years.
One might think, on a purely common sense basis, that the Republican party might want to attract voters—the vast majority of whom are not rich!—by offering them some prospect for higher wages. Indeed, the Fight for 15’s political strategy is predicated on creating a bloc of low-wage voters who will throw their support behind candidates who support raising low wages. So what were the Republican responses to the moderator’s questions last night about raising the minimum wage?
Donald Trump said he was against it. Ben Carson said he was against it (though he used to be for it). Marco Rubio said he was against it. These are, currently, the three strongest presidential candidates in the Republican Party.
Donald Trump said raising the minimum wage would make America less competitive. Ben Carson said raising the minimum wage would destroy jobs. Marco Rubio said raising the minimum wage would make workers “more expensive than a machine.” This, then, is the Republican party’s official message to the tens of millions of American voters making less than $15 per hour: We will not raise your wages. You are not valuable in this economy. You are not valuable to America. You are not valuable to the world.
On a purely political level, taking this position seems insane. (On a substantive moral and economic level it is certainly insane, but we won’t settle that argument with the entire right wing in this particular blog post, sadly.) The fact that major presidential candidates would freely espouse a platform that is economically damaging to a huge portion of their potential supporters speaks to a few things. One, the fact that most people do not have even a rudimentary grasp of economics, and are therefore easily fooled by any economic lie, as is proven by not only Trump and Carson’s statements on the minimum wage, but also by nearly every Republican candidate’s tax plan; Two, the unfortunate but longstanding truth that you can convince people to vote against their own economic interests by waving the colorful flag of culture war issues; and Three, and most meaningful of all, the fact that America is an oligarchy in which rich and powerful interests have their needs seen to at the expense of regular people who, for example, earn the minimum wage, and the Republican party is even more representative of this fact than the Democrats.
If you are not wealthy the Republican party is aligned directly against your interests. They are treating you like a simpleton and a sucker. Do not vote for them.
