Democrats’ relentless efforts to tell Americans what to do might be a few microns less annoying if they obeyed the rules and exhortations that they inflict on everyone else. Alas, hypocrisy has become a core Democrat principle.
Consider one pot that they pound loudly: raising the minimum wage.
“We owe it to workers across the country to make sure our minimum wage is set to a level that works for them and their families,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., insisted last month, as she introduced the Raise the Wage Act. It would boost the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $12.00 per hour by 2020 — a 66 percent hike.
Added House co-sponsor Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va.: “We can’t build a strong economy on the backs of impoverished workers.” Thirty-two senators have co-sponsored this bill as have 165 House members.
Amazingly, the Employment Policies Institute reports that 94 percent of these 197 Democrats pay their interns zero. Sen. Murray pays her interns bupkis, as does Congressmen Scott.
According to EPI (minimumwage.com), such minimum-wage-hike cheerleaders as Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., House Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi of California, and Democrat National Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida also pay their interns nothing.
But wait, House Democrat Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland responds, “Interns will gain practical experience.”
True. But interns could do this and make more than $0.00 per hour if their liberal bosses did not subject them to what Karl Marx denounced as “the alienation of labor.”
Of course, if private employers tried to offer interns real-life know-how, marketable skills, and, say, $5.00 per hour, they would be prosecuted.
The Gang of 197 should explain why it’s OK for them to pay interns $0.00 per hour, yet it’s a federal crime for others to pay them up to $7.24, even if they want to make some money, rather than none. Any private payment would be less exploitive than the “wages” of these “defenders of the downtrodden.”
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton banged a related skillet in South Carolina. “Too many women earn less than men on the job,” she said Wednesday. “When a woman is short-changed, the entire family is short-changed.”
Too bad Clinton short-changed her female staffers.
Although Clinton complains that “women who work full-time, year round, earn just 77 cents for every dollar that a man makes,” she paid her female Senate employees just 72 cents for every dollar their male colleagues saw.
The Washington Free Beacon’s analysis of Clinton’s Senate expenditures demonstrated that her women earned median annual salaries of $40,791.55; men pocketed $56,499.93. Thus, Hillary Clinton’s $15,708.38 gender pay gap favored men over women.
Obama also plays the equal-pay cowbell.
“Ensuring equal pay for women is a no-brainer,” Obama declared last month. He failed this test.
“The average male White House employee currently earns about $88,600, while the average female White House employee earns about $78,400,” The Washington Post’s Zachary Goldfarb reported last July. “That is a gap of 13 percent.”
Citing White House data, the Post added, “In 2009, male employees made an average of about $82,000, compared to an average of $72,700 earned by female employees — also a 13 percent wage gap.”
So, after five years of pay-gap chest beating, Obama’s “change” equals zero. Literally.
Obama this month bellyached that “those who are doing better and better . . . are withdrawing from sort of the commons.” He further moaned: “Kids start going to private schools. Kids start working out at private clubs instead of the public parks.”
Huh?
Obama’s kids entered Sidwell Friends, Washington’s poshest private school, early in his reign. As for those evil private clubs, Farm Neck, Reflection Bay, and Royal Hawaiian are just three privately owned clubs where Obama has golfed as president. Surely some kids work out at those places.
Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, should stop making fools of themselves by following her advice: “Our credibility depends on practicing what we preach.”
Deroy Murdock is a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. Read more reports from Deroy Murdock — Click Here Now.
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