Annals of Liberal Hypocrisy

You know the old saying, “If liberals didn’t have double-standards. . .”

Two items out the last few days deserve a bigger horselaugh than usual. First, Bernie Sanders has agreed to pay his campaign staff a $15 minimum wage, but will do so by reducing the hours of many campaign workers—which is what has happened in several cities, such as Seattle, that have raised their minimum wage. Fox News reports:

The self-described socialist candidate said junior field organizers earn roughly $36,000 per year in salary, with employer-paid health care and sick leave. But he acknowledged that their salary can effectively dip below $15 per hour if staffers work much more than 40 hours per week, which is common on presidential campaigns.

The solution is to “limit the number of hours staffers work to 42 or 43 each week to ensure they’re making the equivalent of $15 an hour,” he told the Register’s Brianne Pfannenstiel. . .

The development comes days after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded that a proposed $15 federal minimum wage could result in 3.7 million people becoming unemployed — far higher than House Democrats’ estimates — as employers struggle to make payroll and respond by slashing jobs and hours.

Chaser: The New York Times once understood this issue, as recently as 1987:

The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00

. . . Anyone working in America surely deserves a better living standard than can be managed on $3.35 an hour. But there’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market. A far better way to help them would be to subsidize their wages or – better yet – help them acquire the skills needed to earn more on their own. . .

If a higher minimum means fewer jobs, why does it remain on the agenda of some liberals? A higher minimum would undoubtedly raise the living standard of the majority of low-wage workers who could keep their jobs. That gain, it is argued, would justify the sacrifice of the minority who became unemployable. The argument isn’t convincing. Those at greatest risk from a higher minimum would be young, poor workers, who already face formidable barriers to getting and keeping jobs.

Hard to believe the Times hasn’t scrubbed this editorial from their archives.

Meanwhile, Sen. Kamala Harris has revived the old idea of “comparable worth,” and wants the government to control wages to ensure that men and women employees are paid the same for different jobs—kind of like the way Sen. Harris runs her Senate office, it turns out:

Men Paid More Than Women in Kamala Harris’s Senate Office and Campaign

A new plan from Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) to eliminate the gender pay gap would fine companies if they are unable to prove they’re paying men and women equally, something Harris isn’t currently achieving in either her official office or on her campaign, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found. . .

In her Senate office’s most recent six-month disclosure, covering the period from April 1, 2018, through Sept. 31, 2018, the median male salary disbursement was $34,999 and the median female salary disbursement was $32,999, leaving women with just 94 cents of every dollar paid to men.

The pay gap was even greater during the first full month of Harris’s presidential campaign in February—the median female salary disbursement for the month, $5,763.97, was about 87 percent of the median male salary disbursement, $6,632.23, a further analysis of her campaign filing found.

I look forward to Sen. Harris fining herself.

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