The Cure for the Ills of Progressivism Is . . . More Progressivism?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, May 04, 2023

 

You have to begrudgingly admire the gall demanded of — and regularly supplied by — the political Left.

 

Liberals and progressives spent the first years of Joe Biden’s term advocating spending programs that compelled the U.S. Treasury to hemorrhage taxpayer funds. They got much, although not nearly everything, of what they asked for. Still, legislation enacted since Biden took office increased federal-debt projections by $6 trillion over ten years. Economic observers now recognize that this orgy of disbursements overheated the economy and contributed to inflation. Now, to combat the effects of inflation on American wallets, the only answer is to demand that public employers pay higher wages.

 

With the fruits of its preferred policies ripening, the Left insists that the only cure for the ills of progressive politics is more progressive politics. At least, that seems to be Senator Bernie Sanders’s view.

 

“There are millions of workers in this country who are working literally on starvation wages, eight, nine, ten bucks an hour,” the senator from Vermont said on Wednesday in advance of a legislative push to raise the federal minimum wage. “Two years ago, we proposed a $15 an hour minimum wage as a result of inflation. $15 is now the equivalent of $17.” Therefore, the senator’s office maintains, the federal minimum wage should be raised commensurate with the growing cost of living.

 

The Vermont lawmaker’s allies echoed his themes. “Haven’t wages for low-wage workers naturally grown in the tight labor markets of the pandemic recovery?” former Labor Department economist Heidi Shierholz asked rhetorically. “Yes, they have,” she answered herself. “But so has the cost of living.”

 

Few would argue that Sanders and his allies are wrong about just how far $7.25 per hour goes in this economy. Nor are they out on a limb when they note that red and blue states alike have hiked their minimum-wage rates over the last decade in response to the empirically obvious fact that the purchasing power of the average American has declined. But to predicate the case for a federal-minimum-wage hike on price instability as though that was an act of God, fatherless and unpreventable, is grating.

 

Moreover, as Sanders’s own personal experience would suggest, a federal-minimum-wage hike would be good for some federal workers and not so great for others.

 

To his credit, the self-described socialist has practiced what he preaches. When Sanders ran for the presidency in 2019 and 2020, he refused to pay his campaign staffers what he had long called “a starvation wage.” He allowed his staffers to unionize with the United Food & Commercial Workers Union Local 400, and his campaign workers won the right to the equivalent of a $15 hourly wage, health-care coverage, paid sick leave, and a graduated pay scale for staffers in senior roles. Bernie Sanders’s interns even received an hourly wage and benefits. But the Sanders campaign soon encountered the problems any employer confronts when trying to make payroll.

 

As I wrote at the time:

 

Last week, the Washington Post received a cache of documents from union organizers and Sanders campaign employees that signaled the start of a new, more public phase of labor negotiations. Of particular note was a letter addressed to campaign manager Faiz Shakir shaming the campaign for failing to live up to the candidate’s ideals. It accused the campaign of overworking field organizers—an entry-level role that is usually occupied by unpaid volunteers, but which the Sanders campaign compensates with a $36,000 annual salary—and failing to pay them the equivalent of a $15-per-hour rate. Theirs were “poverty wages,” the letter alleged. In response, the Sanders campaign did what any self-respecting employer would do: It capped employees hours. Problem solved!

 

The dirty secret Sanders’s advocacy elides is that the number of federal workers who would benefit if his proposal became law is minuscule. An executive order in the first days of the Biden administration summarily hiked the minimum wage for federal employees to $15 per hour, but most government workers already made more than that. Within a year, the Office of Personnel Management announced that it would take steps to ensure that, of the nation’s 2.2 million federal employees, approximately 67,000 more workers who were still making less than that in hourly wages would also make at least $15. As OPM adds, the number of federal employees whose wages reflect statutory limits varies due to “seasonality and agency workloads,” but their numbers are exceedingly modest.

 

Updating the statute to reflect an economic reality that Biden implemented by fiat — which is, frankly, unlikely to change radically from one administration to the next — would be a valuable exercise. But that act of statutory hygiene isn’t going to set anyone’s hair on fire. By assuming for himself the mantle of moral crusader against grave injustice, Sanders papers over the redundancy of it all. And it remains perverse that the rationale for a policy position Sanders held before the present inflationary cycle is now justified by it — a cycle owed in no small part to the out-of-control fiscal policy Sanders fully supported.