Here’s just a little something that you can use the next time you run across one of the loudmouthed imbeciles – like, for example, our former governor who for eight years would never shut up about how Louisiana absolutely had to pass a minimum wage bill – who continue to push ruinous policies which hurt the very people they purport to help.
John Bel Edwards was demanding that Louisiana raise its minimum wage from the federal $7.25 hourly minimum to something above $10, as late as last year.
Of course, this was stupid pandering rather than real advocacy. Edwards knew damn well that the minimum wage was a dead issue with a majority-Republican legislature. He knew that a House and Senate made up largely of business owners had zero interest in artificially inflating the overhead of every low-margin firm in the state.
Edwards could have spent his time advocating for something that might have passed. Instead he simply tried to burnish his Marxist economic credentials with fraudulent arguments about how increasing the minimum wage would help get poor families out of poverty.
All of which is abject bunk.
Nobody raises a family with a minimum wage job. If you’re working a minimum wage job you’re the second, or more likely the third or fourth, income in that family. The majority of minimum wage workers are kids who are learning how to be employees.
And almost nobody who makes minimum wage gives more than minimum-wage value on the job. Either what they’re doing is so menial that you could almost train a chimpanzee to do it, or they’re so horrible at the job that it’s a favor to them by the boss to carry them on the payroll at all.
Either that, or they’re going to get a raise soon.
Either that, or they’re illegals – in which case they made a choice to endure a long, dangerous trek here from someplace so horrible that making $7.25 an hour to sweep a floor somewhere in America while sleeping on the floor of a fleabag apartment with 11 other people might as well be Nirvana.
Edwards and the Left would have you believe that these are factory workers or roofers or longshoremen. They act as though there are undervalued, hard workers out there being exploited by greedy capitalist fatcats with reserved spaces in the Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse parking lot.
It’s idiocy. What it tells you is these are people with zero understanding of real life.
And in the case of Edwards and the left-wing dunces who run the city of New Orleans, here you have a city near the mouth of the Mississippi River which ought to be the richest port city of the eastern half of the continent, and through horrible economic management and even worse tax policy they’ve let that city get overtaken by Houston, Gulfport, Mobile and Tampa for the really valuable trade.
What’s New Orleans’ economy based on instead?
Tourism. What does tourism produce?
Low-paying jobs.
Hotel maids. Restaurant busboys. Minimum wage workers.
So Edwards and his ilk can demand that their bosses, who operate on pretty low margins – if you know any restaurateurs, you know how thankless a business a restaurant can be – absorb more labor costs which they may or may not be able to pass on to the customer.
If the city’s economy was based on transportation and logistics, like the economy of a first-class port city ought to be, it isn’t busboys and maids but instead truck drivers, forklift operators, longshoremen, crane operators and others. They don’t make $7.25 an hour, they make $30 an hour and up. And they have skills that can be taught in technical schools.
Did John Bel Edwards incentivize the growth of New Orleans’ economy along the lines of transportation and logistics? No. He eliminated a big chunk of the state offset to our idiotic inventory tax, which punished every warehouse operator in the state.
So he drove away the good jobs, the ones the folks moving up from minimum wage jobs would want to get, and then he demanded an increase in the minimum wage.
And he inflicted this dynamic on the people of Louisiana every time he demanded a minimum wage hike.
Edwards isn’t the dumbest Democrat out there on this issue. Barbara Lee, the congresswoman from California who’s running against the pedo-adjacent bald-faced liar Adam Schiff for a Senate seat there (Steve Garvey, the former star first baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers, is the Republican candidate), might have that title covered. There was this last night…
WATCH: At a California Senate candidate forum, Democrat Rep. Barbara Lee said she wants to increase the federal minimum wage to $50 per hour.
Spoken like someone who knows nothing about economics.
pic.twitter.com/16piJUwZlh— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) February 13, 2024
The thing to remember is that while this is idiotic economics, its practitioners aren’t necessarily idiots. Certainly they think their constituents are. But policies like jacking up the minimum wage shrink the workforce, and by doing so they create more people dependent on the government.
And that’s what this has always been about.
Let’s remember this when related issues of economics surface in the coming legislative sessions in Louisiana.