Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, pretending to care about the working poor.
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, while
ranting against the immigration bill:
"[W]e've got a serious social and economic problem in America," the conservative senator said. "We've got high unemployment among lower skilled workers, and their wages aren't even keeping up with inflation."
Egads! Jeff Sessions is so concerned about lower-skilled workers and their stagnant wages! But I'm confused, since he's the same guy
trying to cut food stamps even though they
cover 61 percent of Alabama households with children. This is also the same Jeff Sessions who
opposes a rise in the minimum wage:
"We’ve got a lot of problems both in the ability to get jobs; and wages have been stagnant. So as always, the government likes to come in and say, we’re just going to pass a law to raise the wages," Sessions continued. "But what we need to do is create a growing economy and drive wages up -- not to $9 an hour, but $15, $18, $20 an hour. That’s the kind of thing we need to be looking at, and that comes only from economic growth, and an unwise minimum wage may even do damage."
The free market won't raise low-wage salaries because it doesn't have to. Yet raising the minimum wage is a
proven job-gainer: By reversing some of the rising income inequality of recent decades, raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would boost GDP by $32.6 billion over two years, creating an additional 140,000 new jobs. Why? Because rather than sit in some wealthy person's investment account, that money would be spent in the economy. (It's the same reason unemployment benefits are such an effective economic stimulant.)
But that's not what people like Sessions care about. He may use populist rhetoric to mask his xenophobia, but his actions paint him as yet another typical Republican kleptocratic asshole.