Vin Suprynowicz

It’s a common complaint that American political campaigns ignore or gloss over important policy differences, substituting a few slick euphemisms, in favor of personal smears.

It’s certainly hard to miss the preference of the Hillary Clinton campaign for discussing (in many cases easily refuted by eye-witness testimony, see http://nypost.com/2016/10/14/trump-camp-puts-forward-witness-to-refute-sex-assault-claim/ . . . and . . . http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/10/list-debunked-groper-allegations-corrupt-media-donald-trump/ ) . . . assertions that Donald Trump “treats women badly.”

(I suppose the ideal Democratic answer — given that this charge, emanating from the Clinton tag team, is the equivalent of Joe Stalin accusing anyone else of “human rights violations” — would be to nominate a homosexual or a lesbian. Oh, wait . . .)

And mind you, her groveling allies in the “legacy media” keep serving this same, limp, “Trump the bumper” hash from the same unwashed platter, day after day, while studiously ignoring the fact Hillary Clinton’s “Bimbo Eruption Squad” spent vast sums hiring private detectives in an attempt to intimidate into silence and destroy the reputations of the victims of her husband Bill’s sexual assaults (see http://thefederalist.com/2015/09/21/hillary-clinton-is-no-friend-to-sexual-assault-survivors/ , . . . and . . . http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3106180/Longtime-Bill-Clinton-sex-assault-accuser-says-Hillary-enabled-happen-again.html ), which assaults and his lies about them eventually got Bill Clinton impeached, disbarred, and required to pay victim Paula Jones an $800,000 settlement — and despite the fact Hillary Clinton is now revealed to have paid women less than men for the same jobs, both at the State Department and at the Clinton Foundation: (see https://www.lifezette.com/polizette/wikileaks-clinton-foundation-paid-women-less-men/ .)

Remind me again: How many of his defenseless employees has Donald Trump been shown to have raped or told to “kiss it”?

But in fact, it would be hard to find a clearer, more diametrically opposed pair of proposals to re-invigorate the moribund American economy and start again creating good jobs than the positions of these two candidates in the third presidential debate on Oct. 19.

Hillary Clinton proudly said she wants to raise the minimum wage, and also to substantially increase taxation of “the rich” to make them “pay their fair share.”

We already know from Hillary’s 1994 “HillaryCare” plan the kind of Soviet-style government medical monopoly with which she’d like to replace the collapsing Obamacare “exchanges” -– including $5,000 fines for any American who missed paying a “premium,” and jail sentences for any doctor who agreed to treat a patient for cash, or otherwise “out of their proper place in line.”

In contrast to which, Donald Trump vows to push repeal of Obamacare through Congress, instead creating a national system of health savings accounts, while striking down expensive monopoly-protecting rules that prevent consumers from buying health insurance across state lines.

While, on taxes, Donald Trump said (and continues to say — http://nypost.com/2016/10/22/trump-lays-out-policies-for-first-100-days-of-white-house/ ) that he wants to cut taxes on the kind of people Democrats -– even Democrats who have socked away millions in “government service,” like the Clintons -– call “the rich,” those being people who (instead of selling out their government offices to wealthy felons (see http://www.nationalreview.com/article/419791/clinton-foundation-reeks-crooks-thieves-and-hoods-deroy-murdock and http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/at-least-5-felons-among-clinton-foundation-donors/ ) start businesses and build factories, as well as the kind of middle-class Americans who earn enough in the free market to buy the stocks and bonds that FINANCE those job-creating efforts, allowing these hard-working entrepreneurs to keep more of what they earn in order to spur real job growth.

First, let us deal with this nice-sounding proposal to “raise the minimum wage”:

THE DEMOCRATIC SCHEME TO KEEP BLACK MEN OUT OF THE WORK FORCE

As renowned (and, coincidentally, black) economist Thomas Sowell, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, points out: “Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount — and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed. Yet minimum wage laws are almost always discussed politically in terms of the benefits they confer on workers receiving those wages. Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they either lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force.”

In his 2007 book “Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, in the chapter “Controlled Labor markets,” Professor Sowell explains:

“In country after country around the world, those whose employment prospects are reduced most by minimum wage laws are those who are younger, less experienced or less skilled. . . .

“Minimum wage laws were once advocated explicitly because of the likelihood that such laws would reduce or eliminate the competition of particular minorities, whether they were Japanese in Canada during the 1920s or blacks in the United States and South Africa during the same era. Such expressions of overt racial discrimination were both legal and socially accepted in all three countries at that time. . . .

“The history of black workers in the United States illustrates the point,” Professor Sowell points out. “From the late nineteenth century on through the middle of the twentieth century, the labor force participation rate of American blacks was slightly higher than that of American whites. In other words, blacks were just as employable at the wages they received as whites were at their very different wages.

“The minimum wage law changed that. Before federal minimum wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930. But then followed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 – all of which imposed government-mandated minimum wages, either on a particular sector or more broadly.

“The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which promoted unionization, also tended to price black workers out of jobs, in addition to union rules that kept blacks from jobs by barring them from union membership,” Professor Sowell continues. “The NIRA raised wages in the Southern textile industry by 70 percent in just five months and its impact nationwide was estimated to have cost blacks half a million jobs. While this Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the FLSA was upheld by the High Court and became the major force establishing a national minimum wage. . . .

“By 1954, black unemployment rates were double those of whites and have continued to be at that level or higher. Those particularly hard hit by the resulting unemployment have been black teenage males,” Professor Sowell points out.

“Unemployment among 16- and 17-year-old black males was no higher than among white males of the same age in 1948. It was only after a series of minimum wage escalations began that black male teenage unemployment rates not only skyrocketed but became more than double the unemployment rates among white male teenagers.”

Thus ends today’s citation from Professor Sowell. But let’s also now note the confirming explanation of fellow black economist Walter Williams -– economics professor at George Mason University -– on “Minimum Wage hurts minorities” at http://www.investors.com/politics/columnists/walter-williams-elitist-arrogance-on-minimum-wage-hurts-minorities/ :

“Supporters of a $15 minimum wage are now admitting that there will be job losses,” Professor Williams states. “’Why shouldn’t we in fact accept job loss?’ asks New School economics and urban policy professor David Howell, adding, ‘What’s so bad about getting rid of crappy jobs, forcing employers to upgrade, and having a serious program to compensate anyone who is in the slightest way harmed by that?’

“Economic Policy Institute economist David Cooper says: ‘It could be that they spend more time unemployed, but their income is higher overall. If you were to tell me I could work fewer hours and make as much or more than I could have previously, that would be OK.’

WHY DO BLACK AMERICANS VOTE FOR THE PARTY THAT WANTS TO DENY THEIR TEEN-AGERS JOBS?

“What’s a ‘crappy job’?” Professor Williams asks. “My guess is that many of my friends and I held the jobs Howell is talking about as teen-agers during the late 1940s and ’50s. During summers, we arose early to board farm trucks to New Jersey to pick blueberries. I washed dishes and mopped floors at Philadelphia’s Horn & Hardart restaurant, helped unload trucks at Campbell Soup, shoveled snow, swept out stores, delivered packages and did similar low-skill, low-wage jobs.

“If today’s arrogant elite were around to destroy these jobs through wage legislation and regulation, I doubt whether I and many other black youths would have learned the habits of work that laid the foundation for future success. Today’s elite have little taste for my stepfather’s admonition: Any kind of a job is better than begging and stealing.

“What’s so tragic about all of this is that black leadership buys into it,” Professor Williams laments. “What the liberals have in mind when they say there should be ‘a serious program to compensate anyone who is in the slightest way harmed’ is that people who are thrown out of work should be given welfare or some other handout to make them whole. This experimentation with minimum wages on the livelihoods of low-skilled workers is ethically atrocious.”

Black youths had lower unemployment rates earlier in the Twentieth Century, Professor Williams points out (echoing Professor Sowell.) “How might that be explained?

“It would be sheer lunacy to attempt to explain the more favorable employment statistics by suggesting that during earlier periods, blacks faced less racial discrimination. Similarly, it would be lunacy to suggest that black youths had higher skills than white youths.

“What best explains the loss of teenage employment opportunities, particularly those of black teenagers, are increases in minimum wage laws. There’s little dispute within the economics profession that higher minimum wages discriminate against the employment of the least skilled workers, and that demographic is disproportionately represented by black teenagers. . . .”

In other words, according to the definition commonly accepted among today’s leftists including Hillary Clinton, because minimum wage laws have a disproportionate negative effect on young black (and Hispanic, I suspect) workers, preventing them from attaining that first job when they are inexperienced and their labor is thus worth less — preventing them from reaching that first rung of the employment ladder, which sometimes means they will never be able to enjoy the pride and self-sufficiency that come from finding gainful, legal private-sector employment AT ALL — supporting any minimum wage law (and certainly calling for the government-mandated minimum wage to be RAISED) is racist.

Because she calls for RAISING the minimum legal wage -– which will throw more young black men permanently out of work -– Hillary Clinton is, by the leftists’ own definition, a racist.

While the Hillary Democrats blithely claim Donald Trump is a “racist” not because he’s never created good-paying jobs for black folk (as he certainly has); not because he’s ever barred blacks or members of any any other race from his properties (as he certainly has NOT, or we’d have heard all about it by now), and not because he’s paid blacks less for doing the same jobs as whites (as he most certainly has NOT, or we’d have seen it smeared across the front pages of the Hillary campaign fliers known as the New York Times and The Washington Post), but rather because he vows to enforce the immigration laws already on the books -– as required by the president’s oath of office -– while Mrs. Clinton vows to NOT enforce those laws, AGAIN stealing jobs from young Americans both black and white, to hand them to illegals . . . just as Barack Obama has done.

Why do she and Barack Obama support such destructive crap as the minimum wage? To win the political support of America’s equally racist (by the same definition) labor unions, and especially the AFL-CIO, of course — the same reason that leads Mrs. Clinton to vociferously oppose right-to-work laws.

“In order to get labor unions, environmental groups, business groups and other vested interests to support their handout agenda and make campaign contributions, they must give political support to what these groups want,” Professor Williams concludes. “They must support minimum wage increases, even though it condemns generations of black youths to high unemployment rates.

“I can’t imagine what black politicians and civil rights groups are getting in return for condemning black youths to a high rate of unemployment and its devastating effects on upward economic mobility that makes doing so worthwhile, but then again, I’m not a politician.”

Or a cynical, lying crook, Professor Williams might have said — willing to destroy America’s economy and Americans’ jobs for short-term political gain.

Or is that redundant?

Next time: “making the rich pay their fair share.”