Daily Clips: March 28th, 2016
California raises minimum wage to $15: The west coast of the United States is now one contiguous area with higher minimum wages. Somewhere, Tim Worstall is freaking out. Oregon and (hopefully) California were able to reach agreements through the legislature, whereas it looks like Washington will have to take a higher minimum wage to the ballot in 2016.
Not only is this huge news for the many low-wage workers in California, it’s also big news for those wanting to study the effects of the minimum wage. In the next decade, economists will be able to look at the west coast of America and see if the minimum wage *actually* killed our jobs and economies. Something tells me it won’t. Call it a hunch.
How the GOP elite lost its voters to Donald Trump: A long and thorough piece by Nicholas Confessore. I would highly recommend reading it if you have ten minutes to spare. He takes a deep dive into why Republicans didn’t see Trump’s rise coming. His conclusions in TL;DR format? The GOP became the party of the economic elite, ran on trickle down policies (tax cuts, deregulation, and wage suppression for 90% of the country) and thus alienated their working class base.
The myth of the Reagan Democrat: Reagan Democrats is the new buzz term used by pundits in order to justify Trump’s chances to take the White House. As human megaphone Chris Matthews put it in January, “I think there’s a lot of Reagan Democrats waiting to vote for him.”
What’s interesting, however, is that “Reagan Democrats” (that being Northern blue-collar whites) will only constitute roughly a third of the electorate in 2016. In fact, “a new Center for American Progress report…notes that in the classic “Reagan Democrat” states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, blue-collar-whites’ share of the electorate will shrink two percentage points between 2012 and 2016 alone.”
Time to transform Bernie’s campaign into a permanent organization:
There has rarely been a better opportunity to create and build a permanent, national progressive organization than has been afforded by the Sanders campaign. The historical moment is right, with Bernie winning millions of supporters’ votes for his campaign against a rigged economic and political system, against institutional racism and a broken criminal justice system, and for aggressive action to combat climate change.
Tweet of the day:
At this point I think Canada is just trolling us. pic.twitter.com/SYxF8Rxjdw
— Emma Beals (@ejbeals) March 28, 2016
