Daily Clips: October 19th, 2015

Rubio says people can’t live on a $11 an hour, but opposes a higher minimum wage: Marco Rubio scares me. In this field of buffoons, he is by far the most charismatic, fresh-faced, and interesting leader that the Republicans have in the 2016 election. That is not to say he’s offering anything different in policy prescriptions. He’s not. Case in point: when it comes to the minimum wage, he is once again displaying a cultish devotion to the free market (something I have written about in the past). Rubio claims:

I have the full confidence that the American private sector, made up of the most innovative and productive people on this planet, won’t just create millions of jobs. They will create millions of jobs that pay more. Because even the jobs that are being created now don’t pay enough. You can’t live on $10 an hour. You can’t live on $11 an hour.

I simply don’t know how he can hold those two conflicting opinions in his head. The market has had a long time to raise the minimum wage, yet it hasn’t. In fact, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure it was the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 (a government mandate) which established the concept of a minimum guaranteed wage. How can someone seriously say that we just need to leave America’s poverty wages up to the private sector? It’s a lazy and asinine answer. It’s akin to a primal leader sacrificing a goat in order to stop the spread of a disease. It’s a reassuring fable to tell the people, but it will not do anything about the problem.

Biden to announce decision in next 48 hours: We have a little office poll on the odds of Biden dropping out of the race in the next two weeks. Three of us believe that he will bow out by October 26th. I am not one of those three. It seems that Biden is loving the media attention and honestly, who can blame him? The guy has been in the shadow of President Obama for seven years now. Still, I can’t imagine Uncle Joe knocking Hillary Clinton off the top. He’s nowhere near as polished as her and nowhere near as exciting and innovative as Bernie Sanders.

More than half of Americans polled want stronger gun laws: According to Gallup, “Among adults nationwide, 55 percent want regulations to be more strict, up 8 percentage points from 2014. Just 33 percent think things should remain as is and 11 percent want fewer laws on the books.”

Prosecution of corporations drops under Obama: Criminal prosecutions of corporations have dropped nearly 30 percent from 2004 to 2014. According to the report, this “hands-off approach by the Obama administration actually began at the end of the Bush years, when Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip told federal prosecutors in 2008 “take into account the possible substantial consequences to a corporation’s employees, investors, pensioners and customers” when thinking of going after a company.”