Among the usual swampiness, Joe Biden is reviving one of Hillary Clinton’s truly vile political promises: to abolish the disability exemption from the minimum wage. This would kill employment opportunities for those who currently get jobs thanks to that exemption. What makes this proposal worse is that there’s no one who gains from this. It’s entirely, purely, and wholly a limitation upon those already unfortunate.
Sure, we can understand other parts of the promises in Biden’s vast new plan. For example, supporting the Jones Act gets the shipbuilding and seamen’s unions on Biden’s side despite the obvious costs to the rest of us. This is just how elections work: promise privilege to groups in order to gain their support and screw the general public. Shrug.
There’s a certain inefficiency, to be polite, in announcing how many hundreds of billions, trillions, you’ll spend as president. The sensible manner is to work out what is needed then try to get it done at least cost — turning up with a pile of cash and no clear designs is a great way to get scammed out of the money.
But it’s this which should make us angry: “Ending the … sub-minimum wage for people with disabilities.” In God’s name, why?
When it comes to this policy, “people with disabilities” are not people who find Jeopardy! too intellectually taxing, or people with lost pinkies slowing their typing speed. This is about adults who can’t cope with shoelaces, and perhaps the toilet training didn’t quite take. To be able to pay the special, lower wage, you have to gain a certificate from the secretary of Labor. About 95% of those paid that lower minimum wage are already in “sheltered workshops.”
There really are people out there who cannot make their own living. As a society, we should, and we do, take care of them. Assisted or sheltered living, money to pay the rent, the home health aides, and cover the utilities and food bills. And yet there’s also a dignity in earning your own money. However much it’s an illusion, it’s important to have the knowledge that the sweat of the brow made this money which is mine, and I get to spend it as I like because I worked for it.
We are already talking about the people for whom independence isn’t even a goal, let alone a possible reality. This is about whether the unfortunate among us gain that same sense of achievement and even illusory independence we inculcate when telling the kids to mow the lawn before they get their allowance.
My native Britain went down this path, and it hasn’t worked out well. People who had something to do, however humble, now don’t. It really is true that if we raise wages above the value produced then that person doesn’t get employed, that job doesn’t exist. There are people out there whose labor is worth some vanishingly small amount above nothing, and yet they themselves would prefer to work. Do note that no one at all is forced into any of these less-than-minimum-wage jobs. We are, as above, already talking about those being cared for by the rest of society anyway. This isn’t about whether the disabled can afford the rent, or to eat, it’s about whether they gain that dignity from, that pride in, some small day’s pay for a day’s work.
The demand that they be paid equally just means that most of them will be paid nothing at all, and lose that sense of pride and dignity in the work.
What makes this all so difficult to understand is that no one, no one at all, gains from this abolition of the special rate. With the usual electoral buying of favor and votes at the taxpayers’ expense, we can moan about it, but at least we can see the point, the purpose. But there is no one at all gaining from this, so what’s the point? Why try to screw over the one piece of independence these unfortunate people have?
I regard this specific proposal as being truly evil and am, therefore, against it as you might have gathered. But what truly confuses me is why? Whose votes get bought by further damaging the lives of the disabled?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
