mike bski@BskiMike22802
So are you racist, or ignorant?
Those are genuinely the only two options on the table, and I ask as a science teacher who assigns exactly this reading. The minimum wage — the policy you are waving around like a moral trophy — was BUILT to hurt the very people you claim to be fighting for. That is not a hot take. That is the documented historical record. So either you do not know it (ignorant), or you know it and you are pushing it anyway (worse than ignorant).
Let me teach the class you apparently skipped.
Princeton economist Thomas Leonard spent an entire career documenting this. Progressive economists — the intellectual grandparents of your caucus — championed wage floors specifically to price "unemployables" out of the labor market. Their word. Not mine. And "unemployables" meant Black Americans, immigrants, and the disabled. Then came the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, pushed by Southern Democrats and union bosses who were furious that Black construction workers kept winning federal contracts by accepting competitive wages. Representative Martin Dies said it out loud, on the House floor, in the Congressional Record: you cannot prescribe the same wages for the Black man as the white man. The FLSA of 1938 then conveniently excluded farm and domestic work — the exact sectors where Black labor was concentrated in the Jim Crow South. Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate and not exactly a wild-eyed radical, called it "the most anti-Negro law on our statute books." That was 1966. So. Racist, or ignorant? Take your time.
Now the part where your heart is supposedly in the right place. It is not helping a single soul. A sixteen-year-old with zero skills and an empty resume is HIRABLE at $7.25. That same kid is UNEMPLOYABLE at $15, because no business on this green Earth pays forty-two grand a year for someone who needs six months of training before they produce a dime of value. Two-thirds of more than a hundred studies (Neumark and Wascher) found negative employment effects. South Carolina: wage hikes cut teen employment by 8.9 percent, and cut it for workers without a high school diploma by 15.5 percent. The CBO said a $17 floor knocks 350,000 people OUT of the labor force entirely. Not up into better jobs. Out.
Here is the revolutionary concept the crayon-eating wing of economic policy cannot seem to grasp, bless the collective heart: wages are a VOLUNTARY agreement. A worker accepts what a business offers. If nobody accepts, the business raises the offer or it folds. McDonald's already pays well above your sacred $7.25, and they will happily tell you the crew job is a STEPPING STONE, not a life sentence. Walmart store managers clear six figures with no college debt. The ladder works fine. You are the one sawing off the bottom rung with a smile and calling the sawdust "a decent quality of life."
And I have to ask what I ask every Democrat, so here it is: what have you actually DONE for the people of Pennsylvania? Because from the cheap seats, the whole pitch is another handout, another dependency, another rung deleted — and a dependent population that has nowhere left to vote but back to you. The antebellum South needed a captive underclass to keep one party in power. The chains got swapped for talking points. The math did not budge an inch. Quinn's First Law of Liberalism, stated plainly: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You set out to lift the low-wage worker, and you erase his first job. Every single time.
Somewhere a village is short one economist, and I think we found where. The elevator on this policy never left the basement, and you keep mashing the button expecting a penthouse. Running on dial-up in a fiber-optic world. 404: labor economics not found.
But what do I know. I am only a science teacher who actually read Thomas Leonard, the Congressional Record, and the CBO score instead of getting my economics from a caucus meme with a stock photo.
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