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Socialist Senator Sanders Gets a Taste of Capitalism
But does he recognize it? I’m guessing probably not. This situation is the epitome of a capitalist tradeoff. His campaign staff is unionized. He went along with it because he has to as a “democratic socialist.” He is also highly in favor of a minimum wage of $15 per hour. His campaign has a budget, with a certain amount of dollars. So, Mr. Sanders has discovered that, with his current campaign budget, he cannot afford to pay everyone $15 per hour. He has stated, therefore, that he will reduce some staff hours in order to pay everyone that vaunted $15.
Yes, Bernie, when your cost of doing business rises (with little to no productivity improvement), you are forced into tough choices. Do you lay-off an employee? Do you reduce everyone’s hours? Do you reduce only some staffers’ hours? If you want to maintain a viable campaign organization, you will need to make some hard decisions.
Now, will he connect his own predicament with that faced by various fast-food restaurant chains which are affected by the “Fight For 15” movement? Will he now be able to imagine himself in the shoes of the Human Resources and Finance departments of McDonald’s and Burger King? Good question and I’m awaiting the story about how his various employees are taking the news.
Will they picket his campaign offices? Will they take to social media to decry the unfair reduction in hours? Get out the popcorn, everyone, this should be a good show.
Cross-posted at RushBabe49.com.
Published in Economics
If he were capable of the sort of mature reflection and learning capacity to realize that, would he still wander around the streets calling himself a Socialist?
Fear not, RB. Bernie has the IQ of a plank.
The fine people over at Intellectual Takeout Dot Org have been running articles about twice a month on the effects of the $ 15 per hour minimum wage.
A $ 15 per hour minimum wage makes sense for anyone who is unemployed, perhaps due to being unemployable, and feels the big bad world is against them. It is also the darling of older progressive people who no longer have to clock in at a job.
For people who are holding down a job, it might not make much sense. Someone who got hired four years ago at $ 11 an hour and after meeting every demand the employer makes on them now has seen a raise to the tune of $ 16 an hour must be perplexed. It would be totally human on their part to be wondering about how someone can walk in off the street and get a mere dollar less, without even proving themselves at their new job.
Business owners are finding that with a $ 15 an hour pay minimum, they have to taper down the hours their employees work, so they can have a work force and still come in under budget.
It also amps up the desirability of paying people under the table in places like NYC or San Francisco, where immigrants are plentiful. Who wants to pay low skilled employees $ 15 an hour to wash dishes or automobiles?
Here is this week’s article from Intellectual Takeout:
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/support-15-minimum-wage-plummets-when-americans-are-told-its-economic-impact
I think Bernie is quite savvy, like a fox. He spouts this Socialist nonsense, while owning multiple homes and having the life of a celebrity. Also, he has amply proven his ability to do the bidding of the Party leaders, while pretending he has been hurt by them and that he has been savagely kicked around by them.
There was absolutely no reason at all, if he really was a contender, for him not walking across the street from the Convention in July 2016, and starting his own third party. Instead he sold his followers out.
If anyone is stupid, it is those who still follow Bernie blindly, despite the fact his actions never match his platitudes.
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Normally, Democrats and Progressives operate on the”for thee but not for me” program, especially those who are members of Congress. I really want to see Sanders, Warren, and Harris forced to be covered by Medicare alone. They are happy to endorse legislation that mandates a high minimum wage, but not willing to take the hit themselves in their own campaigns. They are happy to pass Dodd-Frank limits on “insider trading”, but are not subject to those same limits themselves (and they therefore accumulate great wealth while in office).
Nope. A high minimum wage makes it more difficult to find entry level employment.
In some places, the minimum wage was used to discriminate against minorities. Any promoting a minimum wage is promoting discrimination against minorities.
It is a good Leftist tactic to make people live by their own rules. Bernie has a rule about people getting a living a wage and more specifically pay that keeps them off welfare, so that taxpayers are not subsidizing the employer (think Walmart). Bernie should be cajoled into paying his employees $50K/year. Also no volunteers, because that is an abusive labor practice.
I really think his guys are worth more – he should double their pay at once and start paying them back pay/reparations and the like.
It really is. You couldn’t ask for a better example of an economic effect.
“See Figure 1.”
When George McGovern left government, he spent some time as a hotelier. I stayed at his Inn for a few weeks while trying to find a place to live in Connecticut.
It was a dump. I found an apartment in record time.
Later though, I read an account of the problems he had trying to run the place. His number one problem was all the rules and regulations that had been visited on the hotel industry by do-gooder (and grandstanding) politicians such as himself over the years. Whatever the intentions had been, he came to recognize that over-regulation was making the industry less and less lucrative. He went on to say that if he had known while a legislator what he had learned as a businessman, it would have made him a better legislator. My esteem for him went up quite a bit on reading that.
Bernie is now and ever shall be a plank. A 2×12. A warped 2×12.
Socialism would work just fine if it weren’t for people like Bernie. (You can use this sentence and substitute in it the name of any other socialist or Democrat in place of Bernie.)
I totally agree with you. What I was trying to state is that a person who is unemployed and who has no understanding of how our economy works is most likely going to be all for the idea that they can walk into a business, be hired, and immediately draw a $ 15 an hour salary. I did not mean to imply that their take on the idea is a good one.
I’m sure his solution would be to have the federal government fund election campaigns.
The feds already fund most of the Democrat campaigns.
Not to mention the free PR work they receive from the Media
That’s the politician I was thinking of, without the personal connection, when I was reading RB’s third paragraph.
In the last 20 or so years, haven’t there been more than one Democratic presidential candidates who promised to use the government funding system until they realized that the limits on how much private money they could raise would unduly limit the total amount of money they could spend? If you’re selling something the public wants (no matter how nutty), government is too much of a limitation on your ambition.
It’s almost like they make promises they have no intention of keeping, but that’s just crazy talk.
Saint Barack vowed to use it in order to attack John McCain, then reversed his decision when he claimed McCain would out-raise him in “such an important election”.
In reality, Obama had a huge funding advantage already lined up. McCain, conversely, had very little money. In my own neighborhood my neighbor (a local Republican organizer) asked everyone to put their campaign signs in their windows instead of on the front lawn. The local Democrat organizers were stealing the yard signs at night because they knew the McCain campaign couldn’t afford to replace them
We need jail time for sign theft, followed by Free Speech lawsuits.
I just got caught up on this a little bit listening to Rush cover this on Tuesday’s show. You can look at this another way, and Sanders doesn’t come off sounding so ridiculous. You can look at this as Bernie giving his campaign employees an object lesson in how Socialism works. When he said he was unhappy with his workers going outside the process and going directly to the media, he’s exactly right. In Socialism, you don’t have unions and negotiations with TPTB. Everyone is in the same situation, being told what they’re going to get. Work is optional. If the State needs you to do some work, you’ll be told what you have to do. There won’t be any unions. Unions aren’t an outgrowth of Socialism — they are an outgrowth of a free market economy and freedom of association to leverage better job and wage security in an environment where ‘the associated’ recognize a need to compete and an employer a need — also in a market economy — to manage the risks to their bottom line. Yeah, sometimes unions resort to lower levels of extortion when they get big enough, but there is always a limit, and in the end, it comes down to what the market will bear. There can’t be any unions under Socialism because everybody by definition is in the same boat. In Socialism, when the State’s level of support goes so low that you starve, you don’t have many options except to leave.