July 16, 2015
Just after announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination Scott Walker denounced the left for not having any real ideas for workers. According to Walker:
“They’ve just got really lame ideas, things like the minimum wage. Instead of focusing on that, we need to talk about how we give people the skills and the education, the qualifications they need to take on careers that pay far more than minimum wage.”
In his Washington Post “The Fix” column, Philip Bump largely endorsed this perspective.
“If the purpose the minimum wage is meant to serve is to lift people out of poverty, Pew points out that Walker’s right: Most minimum wages aren’t high enough to do that. The minimum wage is indeed lame, in the sense that it’s relatively impotent. Earning a minimum wage in 2014 was enough for a single person not to live in poverty, but not anyone with a family — and not everywhere across the country.”
There are a few points worth noting here. First, “the left” has many ideas for helping workers other than just the minimum wage. For example, many on the left have pushed for a full employment policy, which would mean having a Federal Reserve Board policy that allows the unemployment rate to continue to fall until there is clear evidence of inflation rather than preemptively raising interest rates to slow growth. It would also mean having trade policies designed to reduce the trade deficit (i.e. a lower valued dollar) which would provide a strong boost to jobs. It would also mean spending on infrastructure and education, which would also help to create jobs and have long-term growth benefits.
The left also favors policies that allow workers who want to be represented by unions to organize. This has a well known impact on wages, especially for less educated workers.
As far the denunciation of the minimum wage as “lame,” this is a policy that could put thousands of dollars a year into the pockets of low wage workers. For arithmetic fans, a three dollar an hour increase in the minimum wage would mean $6,000 a year for a full year worker. Since Bump seems to prefer per household measures to per worker measures, if a household has two workers earning near the minimum wage for a total of 3000 hours a year, a three dollar increase would imply $9,000 in additional income. It’s unlikely these people would think of the minimum wage as lame.
The last point is that Bump apparently doesn’t realize that Walker’s focus on skills and education are not new and are also shared by the left. The left has long led the way in pushing for public support for improved education. Even now, President Obama has put proposals forward for universal pre-K education and reducing the cost of college. Unions have not only supported education in the public sector, they routinely require training and upskilling of workers in their contracts.
If Walker has some new ideas on skills and education, then it would be worth hearing them, but Bump gives no indication that Walker did anything other than say the words as a way to denounce the left. In short, if Bump had more knowledge about history and current politics he would not join Walker in his name calling.
Addendum
It is worth noting that as governor of Wisconsin, Walker has targeted unions, trying to weaken them in both the public and private sectors. He has also attacked the University of Wisconsin, one of the top public unversities in the country. Insofar as he is committed to a path of upward mobility for workers, these actions go in the opposite direction.
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