In a nauseating screed entitled "Your Fat Paycheck Keeps Your Neighbor Unemployed" (Bloomberg, 9/6/10) American Enterprise Institute "expert" Kevin Hassett asserts an overall reduction in working American's wages is the key to the nation's economic recovery. While an older column, the piece convincingly lays out the conservative vision for us as a society -- in no uncertain terms.
"The biggest problem with the labor market right now is that wages are too high," claims Hassett, a rat-faced little Mr. Know-It-All whose prep school tenure was obviously a series of blows to the head, before stating, with arrogant abandon, "Economics teaches that full employment would be reached if wages were to adjust downward, to a level that better reflects current circumstances. At lower wages, employers would desire more workers. Labor markets generate persistent unemployment only if wages are sticky, failing to fall as demand declines."
What a crock. One can imagine the writer languidly pushing away from the computer with his last punctuation mark, a devious, truly unsympathetic smile plastered across his mug as he speed dials the Institute's on-call pimp to line up a couple of kids for that evening's neocon bacchanal, schemes of public impoverishment fading from his brainpan as he tries to visualize just how sexy those the pink crotchless panties he got online the other day are going to look on a chubby twelve-year-old boy.
Just where, exactly, does this social deviant get off anyway? I mean, who the hell is lowering the minimum wage (which our boy posits cutting back to $5.85 an hour) going to help? The much-too-rich scum buckets who pay Hassett to pen this kind of crap, that's who.
And what crap it is, every line yet another phlegmy aristocratic goober in the face of the working class. In fact, it's hard to even know where to start with this treacherous puppy, each paragraph an example of the benefits of line-item vetoes, it's assertions dead cynical and laughably biased. It's almost as if Hassett sat down thinking "Gee, how much of a prick can I be today?" And he goes on, in figurative bold ital, to illustrate his amazingly bountiful potential.
Master Hassett insists there are four problems to be considered in setting up his corporate/libertarian utopia.
Problem #1: Minimum wage laws.
Problem #2: Unions refusal to bargain.
Problem #3: Reluctance of employees to accept lower pay.
Problem #4: Reluctance to move where the work is.
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