WASHINGTON, D.C. — Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) is the Republican Party’s economic standard bearer and he has a radical new approach to minimum wage that he’d like to see in the next federal budget.
Over the years, his budgets have become the rallying cries for fiscal conservatives. They do exactly what Republicans want budgets to do — slash taxes on the top tiers and privatize social programs. Now, word on the Hill is that Ryan intends to add one more gift to the American right-wing in his new budget — killing the minimum wage altogether.
“I ask you this,” began Ryan at a recent press conference in front of Knavery Financial — an investment brokerage company run by Charles Knavery, heir to the Knavery Capital empire — “what good ever comes of government trying to help anything? Government can’t do anything right. Government is terrible at everything it does. The minimum wage is no different, and that’s why it’s time for it to go.”
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Hill staffers say that Ryan is not completely set on adding language to strip the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 of its establishment of a minimum wage, but that he is definitely leaning that direction.
“When the FLSA was passed, minimum wage was twenty-five cents an hour. Maybe if it stayed at that rate,” Ryan said, “I’d be singing another tune. After all, I think two-bits for an hour’s worth of hard work is a fair deal, but the fact is this out of control spending government has raised that rate to a whopping $7.25 an hour! What business can afford to pay its employees at that rate? That’s an increase of over 28 times over eighty years!”
“Government spending is evil,” Ryan said as he adjusted the tie he paid for out of his congressional salary, paid for by the taxpayers. “There’s nothing worse than government spending, but government picking winners and losers by choosing who gets paid what wage? That’s a pretty darned close second if you ask me.”
Speaker Ryan says there’s a major economic reason to lower the minimum wage to zero as well.
“The simple fact is, and fiscal conservatives have been saying this since 1938, that a minimum wage suppresses employment, ” Ryan said, continuing, “We know for a fact that raising the minimum wage causes a rise in unemployment. Of course by ‘fact’ we mean ‘after cherry picking all the studies that show us the conclusion we want.’ So if we reduce the minimum wage to zero dollars and zero cents an hour, we should see 0% unemployment!”
“We could have stopped the Great Recession in its tracks,” Ryan claimed, “if we had told those three-quarters of a million people losing their jobs each month that they could get right back in the work force if they’d accept sharecroppers’ wages! We need to take down the barriers between allowing someone to volunteer for slavery and the Federal government.”
A reporter The Seattle Register asked Ryan how he explains his insistence that minimum wage laws hurt employment against the fact that her state tied minimum wage to cost of living in the late 1990’s and Washington state has beat the national unemployment and job creation numbers ever since.
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“Yeah, but I bet your low-wage jobs are all non-existent huh,” quipped Ryan.
When the reporter told him that no, in fact the very industry that right-wing pundits claim would be demolished by pegging minimum wage to cost of living actually gained jobs year over year, Ryan’s response was, “What’s that? I can’t hear you over all your socialism!”
Another reporter from The Ft. Georgia Observer asked Ryan if having no minimum wage ensured full employment, why the Great Depression wasn’t over on October 30th, 1929 when everyone who lost their jobs could just go and work for free.
Ryan blinked twice.
“Oh I see, you went to a liberal indoctrination college,” Ryan surmised, “I bet you think Calvin Coolidge was a bad president huh? Well, I’ll remind you that FDR built internment camps for the Japanese and other bad stuff too, so, um. Benghazi that, dude. Benghazi that.”
You can follow James on Twitter @JamesSchlarmann.
