Rand Paul's Race To The Bottom, Con't

 GOP Sen. Rand Paul is a prat, as Zandardad will be the first to tell you.

Not for the first time this week, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul took his criticisms of newly inaugurated President Joe Biden to Fox News.

Speaking with conservative personality Sean Hannity Friday night, the Republican congressman repeated his claim that Biden's goal of increasing the national minimum wage to $15 would cause 4 million people to lose their jobs.

"And the people who lose their jobs first when you hike up the minimum wage are Black teenagers," Paul said. "So, you know, 'why does Joe Biden hate Black teenagers' should be the question. Why does Joe Biden want to destroy all these jobs?"

Paul's claim about job loss is a distortion of the Congressional Budget Office's median estimate, according to FactCheck.org at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Paul said Friday "even the government says that nearly 4 million people will lose their jobs" after the minimum wage hike, but the claim is a reference to the high end of the budget office's range of potential outcomes, according to FactCheck.org. The low end of the range was “about zero” jobs lost.

To support his claims, Paul's office sent the fact checking site a link to a July 2019 report from the budget office that did not say more than doubling the federal minimum wage would definitely result in about 4 million fewer people working.

 

To recap the spectacularly racist argument:

 

1. Black teenagers are primarily minimum wage workers, which is wrong. 42% of all American workers, three out of seven, make less than $15 an hour.
   
2. Raising the minimum wage would cost millions of jobs, again, wrong, for the reasons' listed above in the story.
3. Since one and two are both wrong, three, which is "job loss from raising the minimum wage would disproportionately cost Black folks jobs" is wrong, and even if it was higher, that highlights the problem of racist employers firing their Black workers.
4. Therefore, "Joe Biden is a racist" is stupid and wrong.

 

I'm not sure if Paul thinks Black Kentuckians are really stupid enough to fall for this, because if he's actually right, the racism against Black minimum wage employees is a structural racist reality that needs to be torn down immediately.

So in a way, I'm glad that Sen. Paul agrees that capitalism is racist.

Thanks for playing.