Sigh.
Carly Fiorina, the Republican candidate whose claim to fame was running—unsuccessfully—a well-known American company says the minimum wage should be abolished?
Of course she does.
"First, I believe that minimum wage should be a state decision, not a federal decision. Why? Because it makes no sense to say that the minimum wage in New York City is the same as the minimum wage in Mason City, Iowa," Fiorina said.
Which is why some states might set a higher minimum wage than the federal government itself dictates. But of course the real problem is that any minimum wage at all hurts Ma and Pa Business, who ought to be able to join together and set their own community's pay standards to three buttons, two breadcrumbs an hour. Putting a fixed number out there is far too complex for these wee businesses to handle.
"We are crushing them under the weight, the complexity, the cost, the power of a federal government that frankly advantages the big, the powerful, the wealthy and the well-connected, and is crushing the small and the powerless," she said. "Every time we destroy a small business or we destroy a community bank, we are destroying the opportunity for someone to get that first job, learn skills, and get a better job."
Mind you, I don't know that I'd put cash money in a community bank that couldn't be bothered to pay their workers even the federal bottom-rung wage, for reasons, but at the least to and from the office those workers would be learning the
skill of determining which roadside plants were or weren't edible.
Sorry, I just don't have the patience for this right now. This notion that a minimum wage hurts employees is no less dubious than it's been for years, since nothing helps the overall economy and overall employment numbers more than regular people having pocket money; the trickle-down notion of unregulated markets where we make rich people so fabulously gut-bustingly rich that they just won't be able to help but spend more money on their workers continues to be tried, over and over, and you'll get no points for correctly guessing how that one keeps turning out. It's all blah-blah-blah Gilded Age hokums, a pining for the glory days when you could pay your workers in scrip and dump your baby-mutating toxic waste into whatever pond or puddle was in easiest reach.