And what they say the Minimum Wage, says a LOT about what they think about the value of workers.
Boehner and McConnell respond to Obama
CBS Evening News -- Jan 22, 2015
[...]
PELLEY: Make community college free of charge. Dead or alive?
MCCONNELL: We added more debt during the Obama years than all the presidents from George Washington down to George Bush. The last thing we need to do to these young people is add more debt and giving away free tuition strikes me as something we can't afford.
PELLEY: I'll put that down as dead as well. Increasing the federal minimum wage?
BOEHNER: Bad idea.
PELLEY: Dead?
BOEHNER: It's a bad idea. I've had every kind of rotten job you can imagine growing up and getting myself through school, and I wouldn't have had a chance at half those jobs if the federal government had kept imposing higher minimum wage. Low income jobs help people get skills and they can climb the economic ladder.
[...]
Even though
20 states raised the minimum wages at the start of 2015, Republicans don't think poverty-stricken workers,
deserve a raise.
Heck, the GOP designed the 'school of hard knocks' -- they aren't about to correct it now. Simply to "help the poor."
This next Republican is not nearly as tactful as Boehner and McConnell -- he tells us what he REALLY thinks about raising the Minimum Wage.
And to me, his harsh sentiments sound blatantly Racist ... and Xenophobic too.
GOP rep. : Keep minimum wage low ‘for minorities’ who aren’t worth more than $7 an hour
by David Edwards, rawstory.com -- Jan 22, 2015
California Republican Rep. Tom McClintock said on Thursday that the minimum wage should not be raised because low pay was necessary for minorities and other unskilled workers who were not worth more than $7 an hour.
[...]
But McClintock argued that raising the minimum wage would “rip the first rung in the ladder of opportunity for teenagers, for minorities, for people who are trying to get into the job market for their first job.”
[...]
McClintock continued: “If your labor is an unskilled person just entering the workforce is worth say $7 an hour at a job and the minimum wage is $10, you have just been made permanently unemployable. That first rung of the economic ladder has been ripped out and you can’t get on it. That is a tragedy.”
[...]
The real "tragedy" is that "
economist royalists" like this keep getting voted back into office -- often under the guise of wanting to "
help workers" too.
With "Help" like that -- it's no wonder that Wealth Disparity is as at record levels. The Republicans promote and protect it, like being underpaid is good for us or something.
Like poverty-wages "builds character" ... instead of those corporate bank accounts.