SimpleDon
Veteran Member
Suppressing the minimum wage is one of the ways that we have suppressed the wages of the 99% to redistribute more income to the 1%. This is the one consistent goal of conservatives in this country for more than a century since the income tax was voted in in 1913, don't quote me on the date it is from memory, I believe.
They are reluctant to give up on this one means of suppressing the wages of the poor and the middle class because they are afraid that it won't produce the horrors that they routinely predict and that other wage boosting measures will follow the increase in the minimum wage.
This is really an argument about the effectiveness of their economic policies to make all of us rich by making the already rich even richer first. After thirty five years it is rather obvious that this set of policies, that is neoliberal economics, supply side economics, trickle down economics, Reaganomics, Thatchernomics, Hatcherism, etc. has made the rich much richer while leaving everyone else poorer. They refuse to discuss the policies as a whole, see my thread on it, titled something like the "Republican presidential candidates fealty to a failed economic policy." Our resident conservatives avoided it like they would a plague, uninterested or unable to defend their one clear economic policy position.
One of our many Republican presidential candidates, Rubio I think, has proposed eliminating all of the taxes on dividends, capital gains, inheritance and corporate profits. These are taxes that are paid almost exclusively by the rich. He would pay for it through increased national debt, about an extra $125 billion a year and by cutting Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. Another, Rand Paul has proposed a flat tax on income that will lower the taxes on the rich and raise them on everyone else.
The only time that they are willing to discuss this is when they can repeat their memorized arguments in these backfires like the minimum wage or unions or decreased taxes on the rich and increased taxes on everyone else. They now claim that these positions that they take like suppressing the minimum wage are in the best interests of the poor and have nothing to do with redistributing income to the already rich. Because redistribution is what the liberals want to do and that it is only bad when we redistribute income from the rich to everyone else and that it is not even possible to redistribute income from everyone else to the already rich and that the reason that the very rich have gotten much richer over the last thirty five years isn't because of the economic policies that were instituted to do exactly that it is because of the wholesome natural goodness of the already rich or some unknown and unknowable factor that is new in the economy.
