Trump Treasury Pick Says Keep Minimum Wage at Poverty Level

Wall Street breathed a "collective sigh of relief", said Politico when President-elect Trump chose a traditional financial sort, Scott Bessent, to be the next Secretary of the Treasury. He is a "legendary stock trader who understands financial markets", said the Wall Street Journal. And surprise! The investor and hedge fund manager was once the chief investor for George Soros's fund.

But nothing rubbed off the left-wing philanthropist billionaire onto Bessent, as we just learned
They largely won. States have steadily raised the minimum
wage, but far from all of them.

from his appearance at the Senate confirmation hearings. Senator Bernie Sanders asked Bessent if he would join legislators "who want to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage to take millions of Americans out of poverty". Back came the standard, reflexive conservative evasion in this exchange:

Bessent: Senator, I believe that the minimum wage is more of a statewide and regional issue.

Sanders: You don’t think we should change the federal minimum wage of seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour?

Bessent: No sir.

The last time the minimum wage was changed — to $7.25 an hour — was 2009. The sixteen years since are the longest stretch without increase since the minimum wage was made law in 1938. And, of course, inflation has eaten away at even that low wage. For what $7.25 got you in 2009 you would need $10.60 today. Put another way, 2009's $7.25 has the buying power of only $4.96 today. And this way: A person working an eight-hour shift with no time off over 52 weeks would make only $15,080 for the year — the poverty level Sanders and cohort hopes to dispatch to a shameful past.

NBC's Kristen Welker asked Donald Trump about the minimum wage in her interview on "Meet the Press" in early December. She held up what appeared to be a map showing "these nineteen states that voted for you" that still keep to the federal level of $7.25 an hour. The implication was clear. Isn’t this the working class in the mid-country that the MAGA movement is pledged to champion? Trump’s reaction:

“It’s a very low number I will agree. Let me give you the downside, though. In California they raised it up to a very high number. It’s had a very negative impact."

There it was again, the automatic deflection away from Welker’s nineteen to the state that had, beginning last April, instituted the highest minimum wage in the land — $20 an hour for fast-food restaurant workers. Sanders and allies are of course not advocating a federal rise to $20, which makes Mr. Trump’s detour deceitful. Moreover, Trump was still going by the prediction that the California wage hike would cause job loss and restaurants would go out of business. But by the interview eight months later, California employment in the fast-food sector had increased.

Trump did relent a bit, adding, "But there is a level at which you could do it. Absolutely”. Raise the wage, that is. But now we have Mr. Bessent sticking with the Dickensian world of depression wages that he wants to preserve for the billionaire class to exploit.

States other than the nineteen have repeatedly been raising the minimum wage for years. On January 1st, 21 states did so again. For 13 it was an inflation adjustment. Current rates for other than the nineteen range from $10.30 an hour in Montana to $17.00 in Washington D.C. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal tells us that,

"the unseen effect will be added pressure on many businesses to cut hours, increase prices, and automate away opportunities for unskilled workers seeking a first job".

This is always the Journal's hand-wringing on behalf of business. Let's Fix This Country ran a number of articles on the this subject as far back at early 2013. In them the Journal was saying much the same as now, even giving the CEO of a restaurant chain the run of the op-ed page to frequently harangue against any increase in the wage.

Except it's a big lie for the benefit of business. The dire warnings of “unseen effect” have never materialized. Instead, after years of minimum wage increases across the country we have a booming economy and unemployment under 4%.

Bessent tried to make “regional issue” his answer against a minimum wage increase. He was presumably referring to the varying cost of living in different states. In those 19 states still holding the line at $7.25, an increase would make for prices people could not afford, is that claim. That is always the stock line at the Journal as well: Those are places “where a buck usually goes much further than on the coast”. It is a glib excuse to do nothing. But no one’s argument is to raise the wage to the level of the coastal states.

And if once true, is it still the case that a number of states like Mississippi and Lousiana are so much cheaper? Cheaper in the ratio of $7.25 to D.C.’s $17.00 an hour? Not something in between? But the rationalization is always recited with no contemporary data to support it.

We pick on the Journal because its editors are still making the same arguments they did in our articles of a decade ago, as evidenced in an editorial this October about the time when Kamala Harris was saying she once worked at a McDonald’s and Trump was strapping on an apron for fifteen minutes so that he could say he’d worked there, too. The WSJ’s shtick is,

”[T]here’s no doubt that fast-food jobs provide young people lessons in treating customers courteously, showing up on time, and taking and following orders, which can serve them well throughout their careers.”

Well, yes. No argument about that. Except that the newspaper repetitively uses it to justify keeping the minimum wage at a minimum to give young people jobs.

There’s a problem with that. Some time back, a study found that the average age of a fast-food chain worker was 29, not teen-age. An age when we think people should be able to marry, have children, and support a family. Drop by your favorite fast-food joint and have a look. Are they all in their teens? But the myth will do at the Journal where arguing for business comes before people.

In a further look at who we are about to have as Treasury secretary, Bessent’s answers said hold down wages for those at the bottom, keep the low taxes for the rich. Senator Raphael Warnock asked a series of questions about at what level of personal income might Bessent consider letting tax rates revert to their higher levels in force before the 2017 cuts that are soon to expire? Untimately, Warnock asked, “What about one billion dollars?”. Couldn’t someone earning a hypothetical billion or more dollars in a single year pay the pre-level maximum of 39.6% rather than Trump’s cut to 37%? Bessent answered, “Sir, again, I think these are the job creators”.

You see, they will take that 2.6% difference that might have been used to reduce the annual deficit and go looking for jobs to create. Sure they will.