Hillary Gives An Unwitting Lesson About The Minimum Wage
Last night Hillary Clinton appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and told this story about a little boy she met in Indianapolis (story begins at about 1:11).
Here’s a transcript of her story:
I was in Indianapolis the other day and I was shaking hands after I spoke. And there was this young boy about eleven years old and he’s trying to tell me something—you know the crowd was yelling—so I leaned over and he said, “You know, my mom makes minimum wage and even though it went up, her hours were cut. So we’re not making any more money. Can you help her?” You know, when somebody says something like that to you, it really does kind of energize me. I think, yeah, I can, I’m going to really try to help you, because this is wrong. And everywhere I go I hear stories like that about veterans who don’t get health care, about people, who are, you know, losing their jobs, and I think we can do so much better. So for me it’s just get up every day and fight on because this country’s worth fighting for.
After Hillary finishes the story she launches into a litany of American economic woe - including bemoaning of money borrowed from China and middle class people barely scraping by - but the best point she made in her entire populist speech was the one about the mother getting less hours after minimum wage went up.
One point against the minimum wage made over and over again by people like myself is that by increasing the cost of low-wage labor you actually reduce demand for low-wage labor. Minimum wage jobs are, by definition, the least important jobs at a given business. Thus they are the most expendable. If you artificially inflate the price of the labor doing those jobs, business owners are just going to make do with less of that labor.
In short: This kid’s mom had her hours cut in half because people like Hillary Clinton raised the minimum wage.
That’s if this kid even existed in the first place. The odds that Hillary managed to meet one of the 0.033% of American workers who actually make the minimum wage is pretty slim.
