Friday on CNN’s Inside Politics, political commentator Van Jones said “it is suicide for the Democratic Party” if they do not pass an increase to the federal minimum wage.
“I think this minimum wage fight is a big deal,” Jones said. “I don’t think that people who are looking at this in kind of a bloodless, calculated way [realize] there is real pain at the bottom of this party. Frankly, in red states and blue states, that’s why I’m saying it’s popular on both sides, the minimum wage hike. But you cannot continue to ask young voters and black voters and progressive voters to crawl over broken glass to vote in long lines and pandemics and everything else and then not do stuff that’s going to address the pain.”
He continued, “People have not had a real wage in a generation, a raise in a generation. So this is not just some little progressives-want-to-do-some-politics stuff. It is suicide for the Democratic Party not to do everything it can to get more work and more wages for the people at the bottom, whether you’re talking about infrastructure or whether you’re talking about the minimum wage frankly, whether you’re talking about getting some of this student loan debt and other debt off the backs of people.
“I don’t know what they think is going to happen in two years when it’s time to get people to vote in a midterm election if you cannot point to anything besides a vaccine and maybe a check that’s been spent a long time ago by the time people get a chance to go and vote. You got to do something.”
What is going to happen in two years, if the national minimum wage is an unworkable $15, is that employers will start cutting employees’ hours, reducing staff, and/or replacing them with automation, hurting all the people Democrats claim to be fighting for with this economically suicidal minimum wage raise.