RUSH: Trump is addressing a group of young conservatives. There are some teenagers in there, there’s some 20-year-olds in there. It’s in Washington, D.C. It’s a Turning Point USA event. And he just did something that is classically subtle, brilliant, and indicates that the president does have some really sharp political instincts.
We all know that this lunatic — by the way, have you seen the video of Rashida Tlaib when she tried to interrupt Trump’s rally during the campaign in 2016? This was before she was elected. She was insane. She was a lunatic. She was running around in the greenroom trying to get out to the stage to disrupt this, just shouting from the top of her lungs.
And what everybody has noticed about the video is that she was wearing no bra or the wrong kind of bra. I mean, it was distracting, folks. We’re not supposed to get into this kind of thing, you know, because it’s now misogynistic and sexist and chauvinistic and all that. But beside the physical — she was a banshee. She was going lunatic. Just the fact that Trump was in town had driven her batty.
And she was trying to get through the greenroom, the security people chasing her. She looked like a genuine Code Pink reject. And you have to do a lot to be rejected by Code Pink. Well, anyway, she then went on to become elected. Now she’s part of The Squad. Trump has rebranded the name of The Squad. He’s dropped the name Squad. He’s calling them AOC Plus 3. We can decide whether or not we like that or not.
But, anyway, Rashida Tlaib has just finished a speech talking about how when she goes back to Palestine and this and that — there is no Palestine, of course. She’s one of the anti-Semites extraordinaire, and then she starts yammering on about a mandate, $20-an-hour minimum wage.
Now, I need to correct, I think, given the circumstances as they exist, I’ve always attempted to explain the fallacies of the minimum wage to people who don’t understand them in a different way. I mean, when you talk economic theory to people, sometimes it goes over their head even though economics is nothing more than math. It’s just common sense. Math is hard for a lot of people. So explaining how raising the minimum wage costs jobs, I mean, it’s clear, it does. You can look at the stats. But you try to tell people that don’t understand, and it’s hard to get it to compute.
If you get into a discussion, “Okay. You’ve got a market. People are being paid what they’re being paid. A company has so much money to pay all of its employees. There’s not a pile of money sitting around being unused in the company. And all of a sudden some arbitrary figure or entity like a government demands that you give everybody a five-dollar-an-hour raise, you don’t have the money to do that. So you have to fire somebody or maybe two or three people ’cause your labor costs are statistic. Well, you lose people. “Well, why would they have to fire anybody? That’s not fair. They should pay them the money.”
They don’t have the money to pay ’em is the point.
“Yes, they do. Businesses have piles of cash everywhere. Look at the people that own businesses. They have jets and they have yachts.” No, they don’t. You got it wrong. This is what you’re dealing with when you try to explain this to people. So what I always did when somebody came along and said, “We need a ten-dollar-an-hour minimum wage.”
“That’s great, what about $15?”
“Okay, yeah. Even better.”
I said, “Okay, how about a $20 minimum wage?”
“Yeah, man.” And at some point in this you’ll reach a number where even they will say no, that’s too much. Now, whenever that is, that’s when you’ve won the argument, and that’s when you say, “Why?” Why is $25… and the answer you’ll get, “Well, they’re just starting out. They don’t have experience.”
I say, “How about this, why don’t we just make the minimum wage $75,000.”
“You can’t do that!”
I’m afraid now that no matter what number you give, people would say, “Yeah.” I’m afraid now that if, in my little scenario, you offer somebody a minimum wage of 50 bucks an hour, if you’re talking about theoretically to people, and you’re in an argument about it, it used to be that you could give a number, you could reach a number where anybody would say, “No, no, that’s too much, it doesn’t work.”
And as I say, at that point you’ve won the argument because you ask them why, and the answer they will give you is applicable at any number. “Well, it’s too much, well, it’s not related to anything they’re doing, that’s too much, that’s beyond fair,” when the concept of fairness enters into this.
We’ve gotten so many people, young people particularly, and our population so maleducated and uneducated and propagandized to believe that the free markets are by design unfair that I don’t think, in an argument about the minimum wage, you could reach a figure with too many people that they would reject as too high. It would be an interesting case study.
Anyway, what Trump did, when this banshee starts talking about a $20 minimum wage, Trump, he accepted it and then started referring to it as the official proposal of the Democrat Party. So we have one renegade member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib, proposing and demanding a $20 minimum wage, and Trump recasts it as a Democrat Party proposal because in his world The Squad is the Democrat Party. The Squad speaks for the Democrat Party. Or AOC Plus 3 speaks for them. They are the de facto leaders.
And so that’s just gonna tick Pelosi off. Pelosi is not in favor of a $20 minimum wage for the exact reasoning I have given you. They all know, every responsible Democrat knows the minimum wage kills jobs. It’s just a political position. It allows them to be on the side of people getting more money. Who could oppose that? The Republicans. The Republicans oppose people getting money.
No, the Republicans don’t. What the Republicans oppose, what conservatives oppose is arbitrary, uninvolved people setting the price for labor when they are unaware and unconcerned about any of the factors that actually make the price. It is market activity. It’s a bunch of factors that make the price. Have some gigantic entity enter into it arbitrarily and just announce it.
So the Democrats know that the minimum wage is a job killer, but that’s okay with them. The more people on welfare, the better. The more people on unemployment, the better. But the Democrats don’t want to be directly tied to economic collapse. So at some point even the Democrats will reject a ridiculous minimum wage, which $20 an hour is.
But here comes Tlaib proposing it and Trump, “Okay, this is what the Democrat Party wants.” You won’t see this reflected in the Drive-By Media, but I’m telling you that after Trump did this, within the cloakrooms and the closets and wherever the Democrats go to hide, they are fuming about this. Because the last thing they want is for The Squad to become the face of the Democrat Party. Pelosi and her crowd are doing everything they can to prevent that from happening, and Trump just keeps elevating them to that position.
By the way, we have a poll out, the first poll after Trump’s tweets telling ’em to go home. The Marist poll. Trump went up, job approval highest ever in that poll. It’s 44%. “Well, Rush, that ain’t so good.” It’s the highest he’s been in this poll, and it’s trending up. The point is Trump didn’t go down. Now, I know what some of you were thinking. “Rush, don’t believe this. This is the media sandbagging Trump. They want him to keep talking this way so they’re gonna try to make him think that people support him.”
Folks, the people that run the polls do not dare use them that way. The people we’re talking about would never produce a poll result showing Trump going up for any reason if they didn’t have to. That just conflicts with every element of their program and their objective and their narrative. Trump’s popularity cannot be increasing no matter what even if it’s a trick.