Prominent Democrats joined lifelong Communist Sen. Bernie Sanders in expressing outrage on Friday after the push to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour failed in a Senate vote. Seven Democrats, including Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, joined Republicans in giving the vote a thumbs-down.
“There is not one state in our country where you can make ends meet on the current federal minimum wage. Not one! How quickly would Congress raise the minimum wage if they were forced to live on $7.25 an hour,” Sanders raged on social media. “Outrageous.”
Radical Rep. Pramila Jayapal tweeted similarly, “I will never stop fighting to make the minimum wage a living wage. It’s long overdue that we give 32 million workers a raise and lift a million people out of poverty.” Multi-millionaire socialist harpy Elizabeth Warren and many other Democrats also complained about the failed vote.
Of course, minimum wage jobs were never designed to enable workers to make ends meet. They were intended mostly to provide young people with no job experience a part-time entry into the work force. From there they were expected to move on to higher-paying, better positions elsewhere, not continue working full-time in minimum wage positions like flipping burgers.
Raising the minimum wage so drastically has the obvious (to everyone but Democrats) effect of causing employers to cut employee hours, cut employees themselves, and/or automate the jobs, or risk going out of business. A $15-an-hour “living wage” will only hurt those the Democrats claim to want to help.