I was all set to designate Rep. Lee as the Incompetent Elected Official of the Month when I realized that this month, even more than most, President Biden had that honor locked up. So Rep. Lee only gets second place. The long-time California progressive has a substantial dossier at Ethics Alarms, much of it for her habitual race-baiting, but I hadn’t written about her much lately because of the Julie Principle: she’s an idiot, even most Democrats can see she’s an idiot, and thus there is not much to be gained by repeatedly pointing out that she’s an idiot. However, Rep. Lee is running for the Senate to replace the recently departed and slightly less-recently dementia-afflicted California Senator Diane Feinstein, who even at her most reduced mental state was a more trustworthy and responsible public figure than Lee on the best day of her life. Someone like Barbara Lee should be kept out of the Senate with razor wire, but this is California, so you never know.
Lee has been advocating a $50 minimum wage, mots recently this week during the Senate candidates debate. Got that? An inflated minimum wage is one reason fast food has become too expensive for most Americans to partake in, and California’s $20 minimum wage (other states have this as well) has wiped out many low-skilled jobs. Lee wants a $50 minimum wage, which would mean that toll-booth personnel could pull down $104,000 a year at 40 hours per week for 52 weeks. What’s Lee’s “reasoning”? Why this would fight poverty, of course.
This simple-minded nostrum has been debunked repeatedly, and who knows? Maybe Lee knows it’s garbage. But politicians like Lee thrive because of stupid, ignorant or otherwise gullible voters. In 2021, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the proposed hike in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour from its current $7.25 would lift 0.9 million people out of poverty, but, the study predicted,”employment would be reduced by 1.4 million workers.” It has ever been thus. A 2015 survey of economists regarding minimum wage increases determined that nearly three-quarters of US-based economists felt that a federal minimum wage of $15.00 per hour would be irresponsible. Lee wants a $50 an hour wage. I’m repeating that so it hangs in your brain like the odor a a skunk. The survey also reported that a “majority of surveyed economists believe a $15.00 per hour minimum wage will have negative effects on youth employment levels (83%), adult employment levels (52%), and the number of jobs available (76%).”
What Lee is doing, under an analysis most favorable to her, is trying to buy votes with a proposal she knows is insane but that can’t possibly pass. Under the most damning analysis, she is advocating a $50 minimum wage because she really is that stupid. Hanlon’s Razor tells us to assume the latter; Lee’s history suggests the former.
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Source: Reason
Ethics Alarms 
It seems insane now, but just watch. We’ll gradually move the minimum wage, at least in some places, higher and higher until $50/hr is the next step.
Just as we’ll start printing and borrowing more so that we can out more money for people to fight inflation, so we’ll keep bolstering minimum wage to chase the cost-of-living increases that higher minimum wages produce. The dog will keep chasing its tail until it completely collapses.
The only remedy for this is to sever the populace’s addiction on government assistance. We could do that now, and hurt a lot of people in the process. Or we can do it later, and hurt even more people in the process. Let’s see, which do we choose…
“Lee wants a $50 minimum wage, which would mean that toll-booth personnel could pull down $104,000 a year at 40 hours per week for 52 weeks.”
If they are manned toll booths, that is. We go to Chicago two or three times per year. I don’t think we’ve passed through a toll booth with an employee in it within the the last three or four years. The cameras just scan your license plate and you get sent a bill in the mail.
Which is essentially the point of your entry. Jobs are being lost.
“What’s Lee’s ‘reasoning’? Why this would fight poverty, of course.”
Well, on a purely basic level, she is not entirely wrong: If you pay people more money then there might be more people lifted out of poverty, ¿right? Sounds simple.
But, reality won’t budge no matter how hard you twist perceptions. See, that loaf of bread you are paying $4.50 for will now cost $13.74; that gallon of milk (even with the Kroger’s card and ecoupons) will cost $17.62. So, all that increase in wages goes right back out the door in increased labor and merchandise costs. Adam Smith anyone?
On a side note, the fact that Lee is popular in her local district doesn’t mean she will translate well on a state-wide basis. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D Tx-18) keeps winning her district with huge margins but she got slaughtered in last year’s mayor’s race to – get this: a white Christian guy – by 30 percentage points.
jvb
The horrible thing about this conversation is that people like Lee have this nugget of truth, uncleverly hidden inside the fragrant package of their bullshit proposals, and that is that we need a plan going forward for labor. Workplace participation is going down, wages have been stagnant, cost of living is increasing, food back participation and foreclosure rates are rising… “Stock line goes up” be damned, the bottom seems to be falling out.
I don’t know what you realistically do about this. A “$50 minimum wage” seems like the kind of toddler thinking Democrats are good at: Address the problem by treating the most surface level of symptoms, realities of the market be damned.
Because the reality is that automation is already stealing jobs, and increasing the cost of labor just makes automation investment that much more appealing. That spirals into a situation where I think the average person is going to be unemployed.
And I don’t have the answer. This is a topic that keeps me up at night.
Frankly, I think that the decent into a laborless economy is unavoidable, it’s just a matter of time, regardless of whether or not we speed up the process with stupid policy. Right now, “Truck Driver” is the most common job in 29 out of the 50 states. As technology gets cheaper and as labor gets more expensive, eventually, I don’t think it’s impossible that in 20 years, self-driving vehicles will have made that job obsolete. What do you think that does to the market?
I think the fight that’s coming up is going to be whether we purposefully throttle innovation in order to preserve jobs, or we accept that the majority of people aren’t going to labor physically, and we start to conceptualize what that looks like. And again… Thoughts that keep me up: Even if we throttle our technology our adversaries won’t, so I don’t think that choice is viable, and I think the alternative is a deeply taxed, deeply controlled form of socialism. Which is obviously undesirable, but what else does capitalism look like when your average person owns nothing, and has no prospect to move forward with?
Comment of the Day, HT, and I’m posting it immediately.
Many people support carbon taxes on the argument that raising prices on fossil fuels would cause the masses to use less fossil fuels.
What do these people think will happen by raising the minimum wage?