Yesterday, as part of the boondoggle that the incoming Biden administration will propose to wreck the United States economy, Biden pushed the idea of a $15 per hour federal minimum wage.

There should be a national minimum wage of $15 an hour. Nobody working 40 hours a week should be living below the poverty line.

(Joe has a nice chancre going there on that upper lip)

Along the way, he makes wild claims about the number of children…we are seriously back to the Clintonian “for the children” nonsense, aren’t we?…that will be lifted out of poverty, etc., etc.

Just some observations on this. A one-time infusion of cash lifts no one out of poverty. What it does is create an entitlement. These direct cash payments are nothing but a gateway drug to the guaranteed minimum income. The need for these payments could be mostly, if not wholly, obviated by pulling on our big-boy panties and opening the economy back up. That, unfortunately, would require moral courage, a commodity that has been in short supply for the past year and promises to become even more rare in the coming one.

Biden’s rhetoric on the minimum wage is the same tired old pablum that the left has tried to cram down our throats for years as we have been prodded, increasingly at bayonet point, down that mucky road to serfdom and socialism.

If you are not an entry-level employee and are working for minimum wage, maybe you are the problem and not the entire US economy. The poverty line argument is one of those bureaucrats like to use because they get to decide what the word means. The number, itself, is utterly meaningless as a “living wage” and “poverty line” mean entirely different things depending upon where you live.

There is a mountain of evidence indicating that all raising the minimum wage does it cause employers, particularly small businesses, to not hire people or use part-time employees. While there are claims that there has been no impact in some locations, that does not imply that taking a local rule and making it national will not have consequences. As an economic plan and a means for helping people, it is juvenile, and it will not work.

As a political tool, though, it is golden.

Years ago, the medical profession was the backbone of the Republican party. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, that is no longer true:

Between 1991 and 2012, the political alignment of US physicians shifted from predominantly Republican toward the Democrats. The variables driving this change, including the increasing percentage of female physicians and the decreasing percentage of physicians in solo and small practices, are likely to drive further changes.

The American Medical Association website has more details:

The share of physicians who are owners fell by more than seven percentage points in the six years between 2012 and 2018, data from the Benchmark Surveys shows. During the six-year span between 1988 and 1994, ownership fell 14.4 percentage points, from 72.1% in 1988 to 57.7% by 1994.

At one time, a supermajority of doctors were also small-businessmen. That drove them to support free-enterprise and personal responsibility. Now a majority are employees of large corporations, and their political focus has shifted towards the same government regulation and nanny-state behavior that provides them a living.

Just as these regular checks from the government are a gateway drug to guaranteed minimum income, the doubling of the minimum wage is simply a bludgeon to kill off small businesses and replace a freedom-oriented entrepreneurial class with corporate employees. When married to the current program of lockdowns and the permanent changes to our economy that the public health nazis are sure to impose under a Biden presidency, the foundation has been laid to ensure that small businesses can neither meet the regulatory burden of operations or the financial costs of hiring employees who can’t earn sufficient revenue to cover their cost.