Hillary Clinton Was Into The $15 Minimum Wage AFTER It Was Cool
As part of her relentless effort to transform the Democratic party into Fox News viewers with her revisionist history enchantments, Hillary Clinton recently stole the minimum wage spotlight right out from Bernie Sanders, presumably while he was stranded trying to pay by check at a CVS. ("What do you mean half a dozen magazine covers don't count as a valid photo ID?? One of them is 'TIME.'")
Bernie Sanders may have stood in solidarity with minimum wage workers on strike in the rain, and Bernie Sanders may have been one of the first current senators to introduce $15 federal minimum wage legislation, and Hillary Clinton may have only wanted to raise the federal minimum wage $12, but none of that matters now. What matters now is that she saw cameras pointing at a stage without a Hillary Clinton on it, and we have since started following a new, divergent timeline. The former timeline will eventually fade from our consciousness and only be remembered those outside the rift - Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and the dozens upon dozens of written and recorded statements nobody will be bothered to research or acknowledge.
If the Republican primaries are like a game of Leisure Suit Larry, the Democratic primaries are at this point Joust. Joust was probably the greatest video game ever disigned by a person hopped on some pretty hefty quaaludes. For those of you who may not be old enough to qualify for AARP or remember Joust, Joust was an 8-Bit arcade game where you controlled a knight, who rode an ostrich that could somehow fly, and you had to unseat other knights from their equally flying ostriches without flying into the lava pits. Whenever you unseated one of the enemy knights, the ostrich would lay an egg, and if you didn't collect the egg fast enough, it would hatch into another knight, which would be picked up by another ostrich, which you would have to unseat again. If you didn't unseat all the knights and collect all the eggs fast enough, a pterodactyl would fly in and you had to lance it directly in the beak.
I swear to God I am not making any of this up. If they told me they were making "Joust: The Movie," I would tell them to shut up and take my money. I don't care if it was just two hours of watching people knocking each other off high-speed, flying ostriches over lava pits with a climactic scene where they club the shit out of a pterodactyl. It wouldn't even need a plot. It wouldn't even need any dialog beyond "RRGH!" and "AAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!! IT BURNS!!!!" and "HA HA HA! WE'RE TOTALLY BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF THIS PTERODACTYL!" "HA HA, YEAH! THIS PTERODACTYL IS SUCH AN ASSHOLE!!" It would be worth every penny.
In this analogy, Bernie Sanders is the knight riding around on an ostrich, trying to deflect all sorts of criticism and avoid falling into the lava while picking up as many delegates as he can. Then Pterodactyl Hillary sweeps in to steal his glory because he's taking too long trying to play this ridiculous game. Basically what I'm saying is Bernie Sanders just really needs to punch Hillary in the nose. (There is nothing about any of these mental images that is not amusing, by the way.)
The federal minimum wage debate falls into two main camps:
1. There are those who argue that a higher minimum wage will help revitalize the economy by giving a larger portion of the population more spending power.
2. There are those who argue that businesses will just have to raise prices to compensate for the dramatic increase in employee compensation and the wage victory will be irrelevant.
These two arguments have to do with economics and economics is ridiculous and unpredictable. Nobody understands economics. Economists - whose sole function in life is to understand economics, who put themselves into serious debt going to school for hundreds of years, studied under great wizards, slain powerful dragons and drank their enchanted, kerosene-based blood from magic, jewel-encrusted chalices - don’t understand economics. The best they can do is "speculate" on the "market conditions," which is a fancy way of saying "If a company does something, it will make the stock market go up, unless it the market goes down instead. Either way, I predicted it."
This, a lucrative business career, and a consulting position on a cable news channel is what an economics degree will get you. I could tell you that, and I don’t have an economics degree. Every once in a while, they’ll put some "numbers" behind their "projections" to make them look more "official," but the "numbers" don’t mean anything. I could assign numbers as well. For example, I recently told you there were two main factions in the minimum wage debate, but new evidence suggests we may see as many as eight. That will beat the initial projection by 400%. Honorary degree and obligatory MSNBC time slot please.
The real economic impact a minimum wage hike will make, based on historical data, is not much at all. Every time the minimum wage is increased someone panics for some reason or another, and every time the minimum wage is increased, it ends up increasing from "laughably below the poverty line" to "just meeting the poverty line." If Congress would tie the federal minimum wage to the rate of inflation, it would only move by a fraction each year instead of shocking the system with a sudden five or six dollar jump. Then we could avoid having this exact same stupid argument every ten to fifteen years. Seriously, degree and consultant position, please.
Did I say "two "? What I meant to say was: "Ha ha ha, math is hard!"
3. There are the people who believe that anybody willing to work at least one full-time job should not have to live in abject poverty.
I don’t understand how this is an argument that exists. Not the argument itself, but the conditions that make the argument possible. If people are working forty or more hours a week, and their pay is enough to still qualify them for state aid, we’ve reached a point where the minimum wage needs to be readjusted. There are decorated economic authorities actively countering this point on business networks, yet I still don’t have my honorary economics degree from…let’s say Cambridge University.
4. There are the people who automatically dismiss anybody who makes minimum wage as incompetent failures at life, regardless of whatever triumphs or struggles they have endured.
There are basically two types of people in America: 1) Those who hold an unyielding belief that those who make minimum wage are incompetent failures at life, and 2) decent human beings. Of course, I kid. Most people tend to be awful for a multitude of different reasons.
The meanest and most atrociously spelled insults are almost invariably slung at minimum wage workers by the middle class, as if they don't realize they're only a hairsbreadth away from having to resort to the same jobs themselves. With the exception of Donald Trump - because nobody truly knows what he does for a living - you never see rich people taking the time to alter images with incredibly misguided captions and spread them around Facebook. They're too busy doing important rich-person things, like playing golf, or swimming around in Olympic sized pools filled with $100 bills.
5. There are the people who judge everybody's value by the standard of somebody else's job, because apparently the only vital occupation is being hateful on the Internet. It adds nothing of value to the conversation, but at least the pay is crap.
A cursory glance over just about anybody's Facebook Wall will reveal at least one obligatory acquaintance or distant family member who shared a picture arguing that the minimum wage should not be increased because some other person - be it a soldier, a teacher, an EMT, a welder, the CEO of a multi-national corporation, a guy on YouTube who dresses like a cat - deserves it more. There's always someone that people think should deserve more money because everybody thinks they deserve more money for any reason or no reason at all, and everybody is automatically envious of anyone getting more money whether they deserve it or not.
People will exploit any profession they believe a majority of people will agree is noble to illustrate just how overpaid Strawman McBurgerflipper already is for an entirely irrelevant job. If America were truly a meritocracy professional athletes wouldn't be paid in cargo ships full of gold bars, but God forbid we sacrifice having anything utterly meaningless to never stop talking about. Frankly, anybody who has to deal with several hundred people giving them the same amount of respect these people seem to think minimum wage employees deserve should be some of the highest paid people in America. At least then their scorn would be justified. Otherwise I think we're one of the only civilized nations where people regularly express jealousy over those who have it worse.
6. There are people who just want to completely abolish the minimum wage and presumably go back to paying people a quarter per...hour? day? Many of these people also think the minimum age requirement is pointless. "Let those five-year-olds work for a quarter per day, I say!" they say, adding, "Ha ha!"
The psychotically wealthy like Papa John Schnatter and the senselessly political like Michele Bachmann not only support not raising the minimum wage, but elevate their audacity to an new level by campaigning to abolish the minimum wage altogether. Of just the two examples I named, trusting the guy who has literally built a castle from the money he stole from his employees and, well, let's just say one of the crazier Sarah Palin clones to not repeal employee compensation back to the 1800s if there were no laws to prevent it. The people trying to convince us that the market should dictate what employees are worth are the same people constantly reminding us that minimum wage jobs are worthless and the people who work them are unskilled failures at life. I SEE NO DOWNSIDES TO THIS!
Then there are the senselessly psychotic politically wealthy like Newt Gingrich - whose name literally translates to "The Baby Toad Who Stole Christmas" - who want to take it one step further and eliminate the minimum working age. I'm not sure what the rationale is here, but I'd assume he thinks the job market isn't overloaded enough, freeloading toddlers have had it too easy for too long, and children are better neither seen nor heard in the bottom of a coal mine for fourteen hours a day. At least their $24.50 weekly paycheck would be worth the time they'd miss in school.
7. There are those in the government who put their careers on the line to help working class individuals receive the pay and compensation they rightly deserve...
8. And there are the opportunistic pterodactyls (oppordactyls? pterotunists?) who swoop in at the eleventh hour to snatch recognition directly from those who actually deserve it. (Seriously, where's a jousting lance and an ostrich when you need one?)
This brings us full circle, back to the thing that really matters, which is finally ending this article. We live in a warped reality where we think people who sacrifice their body, mind, and spirit a little more each day to keep everyone happy running countless smooth and efficient operations that we all take for granted are not worth the spit we shoot at them, but we think it's heroic when someone earns six figures giving a twenty-minute speech on a topic she knows nothing about.
We live in a warped reality where someone can get more recognition for an issue she's adopted in the past several months than someone who has spent years fighting for it.
We live in a warped reality where an imbecile trying to be funny on the Internet can fake being a better economist than people who have signed their souls to Goldman Sachs for a segment on the Fox Business Network so they can criticize the Pope for saying God doesn't care about money. ("THE F**K HE DOESN'T!!" Catholic Stuart Varney would say in defense of his true master.)
We live in a warped reality where Joust isn't a major motion picture yet.