Obama Zombies: How the Obama Machine Brainwashed My Generation (19 page)

Here's my response: If the minimum wage at $7.25 is such a great thing, why stop there? If it increases standards of living and disposable income, and if there are no negative economic effects, how about we raise it to $15? Why not mandate that every person make at least $50 an hour! That's $8,000 a month, which comes out to nearly $100,000 a year! We'd all be rich people!

Let's consider some facts. Only a small number of people out of a massive workforce earn the minimum wage--around 3 percent of wage earners, or about 2 million people, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the majority of those people are teenagers and young adults, working part-time and in school. In fact, most individuals earning minimum wage have a household income of around $50,000.
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Not too shabby. But regardless, raising the minimum wage, especially in down economic times, is a huge tax on business that is ultimately paid in the form of lost jobs and higher prices.

Nestor Stewart, owner of Stewart Pharmacy in McMinnville, Tennessee, said that the increase in the minimum wage was "catastrophic."
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He explained that "higher wages" prevent him and other small-business owners from expanding their operation. "I've got to eliminate and be more conservative about these part-time employees," he said. "I have to. I have to have something left in the bot
tom line. It's just creating a terrible problem." As ABC News noted, Stewart will have to raise his pharmacy's prices to cover the new salary costs. No worries, Zombie! It's the liberal intention that counts. Disregard the results: Stewart's cutting down business hours, slashing employee work hours, and his inability now to hire students returning to college--it's the
thought
that counts, people!

But this is not an isolated incident. According to economics professor David Neumark, "the bulk of the evidence--from scores of studies, using data mainly from the U.S. but also from many other countries--clearly shows that minimum wages reduce employment of young, low-skilled people. The best estimates from studies since the early 1990s suggest that the 11% minimum wage increase . . . will lead to the loss of an additional 300,000 jobs among teens and young adults. This is on top of the continuing job losses the recession is likely to throw our way."
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Sorry, Zombies, but your Messiah is kicking young people's economic rear ends. Minimum-wage increases mandate unemployment. How's that for fairness? But don't listen to me. A report in the
Journal of Economic Perspectives
noted that 71 percent of economists at America's top universities--many of which are liberal havens--agree that "a minimum wage increases unemployment among the young and unskilled."
⁷

Currently, the teen unemployment rate tops 25 percent, and the unemployment rate for black teens is above 50 percent.
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For young adults, that rate is closing in on 20 percent, more than double the national unemployment rate.
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Rather than reduce poverty, liberal policy is reducing opportunity for finding a job. What's more, even those young people whose jobs aren't slashed when the minimum wage is increased still get
higher prices. If you have more money in your wallet, you have still been robbed of its buying power because of price inflation.

But who needs rational economic thinking when you can instead feel all warm and fuzzy and special inside by conning Zombies into voting for you even though, in fact, you know you are killing jobs and inflating prices?

SO NOW WE
move on to the second economic lie the liberal machine uses to hypnotize future Obama Zombies--the evil, nefarious "wage gap" between men and women. Have you heard that women make seventy-seven cents to every dollar a man makes? It's been the liberal line for a while now. During the election, B.H.O. ran a TV ad in battleground states specifically targeting women, hyping up the inequity in pay between the sexes. The ad starts off by saying how many women work to support their families but are paid only seventy-seven cents to the dollar of their male counterparts. In the background we see women in professional attire and women in hard hats. The ad then accuses John McCain of not understanding our economy since he opposed a law that guaranteed equal pay for equal work.

While on the stump in New Mexico, B.H.O. said this:

The choice could not be clearer. It starts with equal pay. Sixty-two percent of working women in America earn half or more of their family's income. But women still earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2008. You'd think that Washington would be united in its determination to fight for equal pay.
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So, are women really paid less than men?

Yes, it is true that men tend to earn more than women, but don't assume it's gender discrimination. Let's walk through a scenario: If a business could really get the same quality of work from women for the same job at such a discounted rate, why wouldn't employers hire all women? It would be bad business to keep all men on hand. The smart employers would drop their men and swoop up all the women for a discounted price. There's no way other businesses could compete. So perhaps there are other differences that account for the pay gap between men and women.

Cait Murphy, an editor at
Fortune
, blew the phony wage gap myth out of the water, noting that men and women get paid differently because they're engaging in different lifestyle choices that affect pay scales. Murphy, who is a woman, cited peer- reviewed research done by another woman, June O'Neill, an economist who served as director of the Congressional Budget Office under Bill Clinton.

As Murphy writes, "What [O'Neill] found was that women are much more likely over the course of their lives to cut back their hours or quit work altogether than men, for issues involving the family."
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Women's lifestyle choices matter when it comes to full-time employment because "you go part-time or take years out of the labor force, that has an effect on earnings down the line, due to loss of seniority or missed promotions."

It has nothing to do with sexism. Murphy argues that "of women aged 25-44 with young children, more than a third were out of the labor force; of those women who did have jobs, 30% worked part-time." Again, this has considerable effects when one is moving in and out of the labor force, as many wages take into account seniority of service. Moreover, getting promotions is often a function of years served and experience gained.

"All told," says Murphy, "women are more than twice as likely to work part-time as men and over the course of their lifetimes, work outside the home for 40% fewer years than men. That accounts for a significant chunk of the pay gap."

But that's not all. There's also something, um, a bit more understated, but very important in determining wage factors. Murphy continues:

Despite the many advances the women's movement has brought the U.S., what it hasn't done, thank heavens, is make men and women the same. The simple fact is--and there is nothing nasty or conspiratorial about it--the sexes continue to choose different avenues of study and different types of jobs.

Here's an illustrative example. The college majors with the top starting salaries, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, are: chemical engineering (almost $60,000), computer engineering, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering. Men make up about 80% of engineering majors. Women predominate among liberal arts majors--whose salaries start at a little more than $30,000. Putting it all together . . . these differences--in choice of work, years in the workforce, and hours of work--could account for as much as 97.5% of the differences in pay between men and women.

Other differences? Men are more likely to work more hours than women; men are more likely to take hazardous jobs than women are, which is why more men are truck drivers, firefighters, police officers, construction workers, flight engineers, and coal miners than are
women. And guess what? Dangerous jobs equal higher pay than, say, secretarial jobs. Again, it's all about choices.

Here's what the liberal machine will never tell its dronelike youth Zombies: The "pay gap" for women shrinks to ninety-eight cents for every dollar earned by men, after factoring in work experience, education, and occupation.
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And women in their twenties in big cities, including New York and Dallas, are making nearly 20 percent more than men in their twenties.
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You go, girls! In some categories, one researcher found, the starting salaries for women as investment bankers and dietitians, for instance, were considerably higher than men's.
¹⁴

Is there actual discrimination in some cases? I'm sure that occurs. But the beauty of the free market is that the company that discriminates for the sake of discrimination will be bad-mouthed and the wronged employee can also go to a competitor. Moreover, the employee can sue.

But here's the grandest irony of all this leftist silliness. Did you know that while B.H.O. was a United States senator he paid his female staffers
less
than his male ones? Obama's female employees made on average seventy-eight cents for every dollar a man earned. In real numbers, women brought home an average salary of $44,953.21, which was $12,472 less than the $57,425 average salary that the then-senator paid men. It gets better. McCain's female staffers not only earned 24 percent
more
on average than Obama's gals, but they also earned more than McCain's male employees.
¹⁵

Were the women less qualified in Obama's office than the men? I have no clue. Whatever the reason, McCain closed the "gender gap" without the force of government.

Oh, and here's another inconvenient truth: women's wages grew more during
conservative
administrations than liberal ones. In fact, the administrations of Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and
George W. Bush had higher "labor market progress for women" compared to the administrations of Clinton and Carter. For instance, women's "annual wage growth relative to men's" for the Reagan administration was 1.6 percent, compared to 0.21 percent for Clinton.
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Moral of the story? Liberals' economic lies have lobotomized my generation.

OUT OF ALL
the mindless buzzwords liberals use, none is more annoying than
green jobs
, which is the third major economic lie liberals tell. Obama promised to create 5 million green jobs. So far, he's allotted nearly $100 billion for green schemes.
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So what is a "green" job? Good question. Nobody really knows. I get these images of Captain Planet scurrying about tall buildings with a windmill on his back, but in reality, green jobs are a big fat myth--one that Obama Zombies wholeheartedly embrace.

You remember Zombie Jessy Tolkan, right? She's part of the faux youth organization the Energy Action Coalition, which pretends to represent forty different youth organizations on addressing "climate change." Back in 2007, Jessy and her cohorts initiated a conference called Power Shift, where they flew in around six thousand young people to Washington, D.C. In addition to reduction in CO
2
emissions, the group's legislative demands included government "investment" in "green jobs."

While in the nation's capital, Jessy went on television with the granddaddy of all Zombies, Chris Matthews, to discuss the youth vote and climate change. On air, Tolkan continued with the usual lies about how our sea levels are rising, glaciers are melting, the wildfires and droughts are all the result of global warming, that Sarah Palin
loves clubbing baby seals . . . you know, the normal liberal talking points.

Tolkan then declared: "It's an essential problem. It is my future. Millions of people's lives are at risk. This is not a matter of if. It's a matter of having to do it right now, without a doubt. I have to say, it's going to be good for the American economy. We have the opportunity to create millions of new green jobs."
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Marcie Smith, a college Zombie participating in 2009's Power Shift conference in Washington, D.C., argued that green jobs were needed to address "climate justice." She even had the stones to compare her global-warming comrades to the leaders of the civil rights movement! Marcie told CNN:

I've been working on a lot of climate adjustment issues from the local level, the state level, the national level, as well as at the international levels. And I think that that's one of the really, really cool features of this movement, in particular, is that this is a movement of profound and historic solidarity and reconciliation . . . you have the daughters and the sons of the civil rights movement, of the suffrage movement, of the labor movement. You know, and all of these sort of veins of equality movements are coming together under the banner of climate justice which is really, really important and profoundly historic.
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But we still haven't learned about all those green jobs and how they will be created. For starters, governments cannot create private-sector jobs; they can only move resources around. A government redistributes money within the economy. It doesn't create wealth; it
only confiscates wealth. But if green energy is such a good idea, venture capitalists will produce it using their own money.

Green jobs are all bark but no bite. But don't take my word for it. Let's see how it's been instituted by our friends overseas.