I don’t remember wages skyrocketing under Democrats. They’ve been in office quite a bit since 1974. If the Republicans are a “0” on a scale from 1-10 in terms of income of average Americans, the Democrats may be charitably considered a “3” or “4”.
I’m not a republican. I’m not a democrat. I am a liberal who applauds Democratic Party efforts to raise the minimum wage because it has a force-multiplier effect. For every small employer who decides to hang it up rather than pay the elevated wages; the market solves the problem in the macroeconomic model. Such is capitalism; if you don’t want to sell me a widget; someone else will…use that income to pay their employee…expand their enterprise…etc.
Other than the minimum wage advocacy, I do not see where Democrats have anything to say to Republicans about raising the wages of workers. The way it should work is that you encourage continuous compulsory training so that today’s wage earners can become tomorrow’s salaried professionals. But really, we’ve had GSLs, Pell Grants, the GI Bill, etc… for decades. While we could lower the requirements to this and allow improvement on a micro scale (such as a grant to workers so they can just learn a language or learn computers without enrolling in 16 semester hours), on the whole, the idea that the American worker is eager to get more and more training is sadly just a myth.
Anyway, I don’t think you can lay this at the feet of the Republicans. Could they do more? Sure. Could the Democrats? Sure. Could Corporate America? Sure. This is one reason I find the potential candidacy of Howard Schultz so intriguing. He has been (mostly) a good corporate citizen; the type of employer whose values we’d like to see copied. Compare that to the blob in office now whose policy seemed to be grab as much ***** as possible.
