The insane push for a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour just took an absolutely astounding turn.
One leading progressive now claims that $15… a level that could destroy companies and kill jobs… isn’t going far enough!
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) – one of the four Democratic lawmakers in “The Squad” of far-left progressives – is calling for a 33 percent increase on top of that.
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“Big fights like this one, $15. When we started it, it should have been $15,” Tlaib said, according to the Washington Examiner. “Now I think it should be $20 … It should be $20 an hour. $18-20 an hour.”
She claims it’s because of the higher cost of “a lot of things.”
But if that minimum wage is ever enacted, no one would be able to afford anything… because millions of jobs would be lost as employers would be unable to pay the higher wage.
And those that can afford to do so will automate more positions, eliminating those jobs for good.
Democrats such as Tlaib who push these massive wage hikes clearly haven’t done their homework – or if they did, they flunked the math part of it.
[Sponsored] Triple Your Fat-Burning (take this 1 step – it’s easy)>Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said a federal minimum wage hike of $15 an hour would cost 1.3 million jobs nationwide, and possibly lead to as many as 3.7 million jobs lost – leading to a $9 billion drop in “real income” by 2025.
That’s a projection.
But we also have real-world numbers to look at, like Seattle’s disastrous phase-in of a $15-an-hour minimum wage.
When it hit $13 in 2016, low-wage workers saw a 9.4 percent drop in the number of hours worked per month and the number of low-wage jobs fell by 6.8 percent.
That led to the equivalent of 5,000 lost jobs and 3.5 million lost hours, according to an analysis from the University of Washington.
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David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Washington Post in 2017 that those numbers were the “canary in the coal mine” for mandated minimum wage hikes.
Free-market conservatives will point to a better solution: In a churning economy with near-full employment, companies hoping to compete will raise wages entirely on their own.
“We can have an unlimited minimum wage through private sector prosperity,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Fox News in response to Tlaib.
Again, this isn’t a theory.
There’s another real-world example pulled from recent headlines.
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Bank of America, which already set its own minimum wage to $15 an hour in 2017, raised it to $20 an hour this year.
“If you get a job at Bank of America, you’ll make $41,000 per year,” Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan said on MSNBC earlier this year.
Why?
Competition!
Bank of America was responding to rival JPMorgan Chase, which increased its own minimum wage to between $15 to $18 an hour, then cut the deductible on low-wage workers’ health plans.
That kind of competition is just good business in a good economy – the kind of market where everyone wins, no government action needed.
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That’s why Kudlow says we don’t need a law – because these banks and dozens if not hundreds of other companies are already doing it on their own, and will continue to do so if we just leave them alone.
And eventually, he predicted that all of their wages will be in the $15-$20 zone.
“You look at some of these big companies, you know, Walmart and others, I’m going to say $15 to $20 minimum wage because of private sector prosperity,” he said on Fox News. “That is the best way to do it and that’s where we’re going.”
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”