Watching the only TV station (KSBW) on the Monterey peninsula this morning, I was surprised to see an Editorial – I didn’t know they did those anymore on local tv. But as I listened to the president and general manager, Joseph Weston, I started yelling at the screen.
In a nutshell: he’s opposed to raising the minimum wage. The tired argument he trotted out was that it would raise prices. Then he played video of an editorial he did 8 years ago about the same subject. For the better part of a decade, here’s what he has been advocating:
- Instead of giving the poor more money, lower their taxes so they could keep more of their own money.
- to compensate for that tax cut, raise user fees.
In a nation of people who don’t think anything through, this sounds great. But someone with half a brain realizes that the poor aren’t poor because they are paying too much in taxes. You can only “keep your money” if you have some to begin with, which many out of touch Republicans think is the standard, natural order of things. And Republicans have learned that they can eschew taxes out of one side of their mouth and raise “fees” out of the other side. ‘Cos then they can demonize the poor by saying “no one is forcing them to license a car.”
The right wing wants you to think that the minimum wage is all about teens working retail for extra money. The reality is that the minimum wage is what the working poor are paid. Try getting food and shelter for a family of 3 or 4 on $8 an hour.
And in the last 8 years, prices have gone up – without a minimum wage hike.
I knew from the guy’s ridiculous helmet of hair that his editorial was gonna be a bunch of right wing bullshit. And the fact that he’s repeating his old arguments shows how backward his views are.
