President Barack Obama will dedicate a significant portion of his State of the Union address tonight to an increased minimum wage—he will not only announce an executive order raising the minimum wage for future federal contract workers, but will call also upon Congress to raise the wage nationally.
Art Laffer has some interesting thoughts on this idea. Last week, the right-wing economist made inflammatory and widely noted remarks on Fox News, in which he called increasing the minimum wage the “black teenage unemployment act.”
Laffer will also be attending the State of the Union tonight to hear Obama speak about the minimum wage, thanks to GOP Representative Darrell Issa, who posted this on Twitter late Tuesday afternoon:
Really, this can only be described as pure trolling of Obama’s minimum wage proposal by Issa. Laffer’s comments received extensive attention in the press and easily constitute his most visible entry into the public debate in recent months.
Incidentally, aside from injecting some ugly racial animus into the minimum wage debate, Laffer got his facts wrong. A whopping 84 percent of Americans who work for the minimum wage are over 20.
