Thom Tillis vs. Sam Walton and Ray Kroc
From an interview of North Carolina Republican Senate Candidate Thom Tillis by NBC’s Chuck Todd today:
Todd: Do you think [the minimum wage] should be raised in North Carolina?
Tillis: I think that’s a decision that the legislature needs to make with businesses.
Todd: Well, you’re the speaker. Would you make that decision?
Tillis: Right now what we’re trying to do is make the minimum wage – we’ve got a president and Kay Hagan that want to create a minimum wage economy. What I want to do is create jobs that make the minimum wage irrelevant.
Todd: Okay, so… you haven’t really said whether you’d be for raising it or not. Would you support raising it in North Carolina or not?
Tillis: … Instead of focusing on this sort of defeatist mentality where we’ve gotta up the minimum wage, why don’t we focus on creating better-paying jobs?
Okay, so now we know that (1) Tillis credits Barack Obama and Kay Hagan with founding Walmart and transforming McDonald’s–sorry, Sam Walton and Ray Kroc, you didn’t built that–and (2) he wants to force Walmart and McDonald’s to shut down for lack of ability to compete for labor with all those high-paying jobs he will help create once he’s a senator.
Obama and Hagan better start thinking about selling all their stock in these companies they built.
(Sorry; I couldn’t resist posting this. Tried hard, but couldn’t resist.)
Why do republicans always sound so stupid?
They have this list of cliches from which they pick everything they say, and they don’t bother to try to match the situation or issue at hand to a cliche that actually connects to it. It’s just a series of non sequiturs that use cliches like robots would.
Tillis is a mealy mouthed son of a bitch. But because I don’t like meaningless cliches, I’ll tell you what he meant. It is by no means meaningless, or cliche, or non sequiter.
He doesn’t want a raise in the minimum wage… or any minimum wage at all. But he doesn’t want to say that in so many words. He wants “government to get out of the way” with its taxes and regulations so the real workers can “create jobs” the way they have since 1981. Jobs like Walmart and McDonalds… with half the country making a dollar an hour and the other half envying them.
So lets give up on the cliches and call a spade a spade.
Too bad we don’t have a president who meaningly supports a meaningful minimum wage (not 65 cents less than LBJ’s, 45 years, a.k.a., 180 growth quarters later).
The case for the $15 minimum wage can be summed up in one short sentence:
3.5%* increase in overall prices not going to get 45% of our workforce fired.
* 45% of workforce gets average $8,000 raise; 5% gets the other half too = 70 million X $8,000 = $560 billion out of $16,000 billion.
* $15 about 45 percentile wage.
Be overwhelming to hear this simple truth from a heavy proselytizing president. I say $15 would sell itself — at least a lot better than $10.10 because a much more dramatic, attention grabbing issue; not the usual Dem half-assed that helps keep Repub dumb-assed sounding compelling and relevant by comparison (at least Repubs will wreak the country instead of changing nothing).
Alternate policy comparison: E.I.T.C. transfers $55 billion = .35% of GDP (which grows per capita 1% yearly).