Modern politics in many quarters is more performance art than serious policy, a never-ending quest to generate votes rather than address substantive issues. This was on full display last week with the introduction in the Senate of the so-called Living Wage for All Act.
The legislation is sponsored by Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who fancies himself a moderate. The measure would more than triple the federal minimum wage over the next 12 years, boosting the floor from $7.25 an hour to $25. Sen. Murphy called his proposal “common good capitalism.” So much for the party’s “affordability” agenda.
“I’m not a democratic socialist,” he said, “but I do believe that the Democratic Party has been historically way too timid in taking on corporate power. I think our party should have bigger ideas. I put one on the table last week, a $25 minimum wage.”
If Sen. Murphy believes this qualifies as a “big idea,” he is a victim of intellectual stagnation. Outlawing jobs that don’t pay an arbitrary hourly wage as defined by government central planners has been a part of the progressive agenda for decades. But the fact that the good senator has set his proposed floor at $25 an hour is a tacit acknowledgment that such interventions will have deleterious consequences. After all, why stop there? Why not $50 an hour? Won’t that make everybody richer?
Sen. Murphy maintains “we can afford” to pay this higher wage but choose not to “because we’ve become OK with dozens and dozens of people in this country making hundreds of billions of dollars” — whatever that non sequitur means. Of course, by “we,” Sen. Murphy, a professional politician for nearly 30 years, means somebody else.
Sen. Murphy has apparently pigeonholed what happened in California after that state imposed a $20 minimum wage on fast-food workers in 2024. Prices soared and up to 19,000 jobs disappeared, the Cato Institute reported. The law represents “a price control on labor,” Cato’s Michael Chapman wrote last year. “Employers and workers are not free to negotiate the wages they want; the government dictates the price. And this, as decades of evidence shows, puts people out of work.” And those who lose their jobs — or see their hours drastically cut — are the lower-wage workers such policies purport to help.
No word from Sen. Murphy on how this fits into the Democratic narrative about Americans struggling with “affordability” issues. What does he think will happen to the prices of goods and services if his proposal becomes law? The disconnect is startling but, unfortunately, not at all surprising. Run this bill through the shredder.
