welcome back this week fed chair jerome
powell told us the real unemployment
rate is 10
and they're around 15 million americans
looking for work
think about which parts of the economy
have been hit hardest by the lockdowns
travel
hospitality bars and restaurants these
are some of the sectors
with the highest proportion of small
businesses and a high proportion of
workers who are immigrants
according to the data another category
badly affected by lockdowns
is younger workers many on starting
salaries so
if you really wanted to make things
worse in this country to make things
harder
for the exact people who've already been
hurt the most here's what you do you'd
impose a nationwide minimum wage that's
close to the midpoint of wages in some
poorer states i don't know something
like 15 an hour you'd force all
companies to pay it not just giant
global corporations like amazon who can
afford it
but every single small business who
can't and on top of that you'd open the
borders
so even more low-wage workers can come
into the country just to make it
that bit harder for unemployed americans
to get their jobs back
and would you believe it that's exactly
what joe biden's doing it takes a
special kind of genius
to destroy economic opportunity for the
lowest paid americans on the scale that
biden
is proposing but thank god we have a
president who is up to the job of
killing everyone else's job come on man
you know it makes sense here with me now
to talk more about president biden's
jobs disaster
his co-founder and publisher the daily
caller neil patel
um neil it's interesting that sort of
typical conservative response to
minimum wage oh free markets you can't
interfere with free markets you had a
much more interesting take which aligns
more with my view on this a more sort of
conservative populist take which is
we want workers to be paid more but
we've got to take account of the
circumstances
and how it would affect them depending
on who employs them
steve i think there's actually a great
argument for the for the free market
approach
but if you're going to have a minimum
wage and we do all over the country
then it really makes no sense to do it
the way we do it where it's uniform
the minimum wage the concept the left
concept especially is sort of a livable
wage
and i can see the argument to apply that
to the huge multinational companies with
billions in profits and thousands of
employees
so walmart amazon the companies are
actually lobbying for the minimum wage
maybe it makes sense for them i think it
makes a lot less sense for small
business as you're saying as you
just said small business has been
devastated through this pandemic
and uh the the use case is just
different if if you have a deli
uh down the street from you and the
owner wants to take a few hours off in
the afternoon
and have a high school kid come in then
that's a really different case than what
amazon pays their thousands and
thousands of employees so
uh that and then the second part is
geographically you hit on this too
um how does it make sense new york has
more than double the
cost of living for a lot of small towns
in america why would manhattan have the
same minimum wage as a small town in
kansas that's just that makes zero sense
so of course and so the question is why
are they
pushing this nationwide it is so
transparently stupid
for all the reasons you've given why are
they doing it i don't know if it's
stupid from amazon or walmart's
perspective you know if your
primary uh competitors in many
communities are small businesses
and you can uh you can price them out of
the market then
that as a business matter that that may
not be stupid for them
uh as a public policy matter for us for
washington for biden
uh it makes no sense these these small
businesses are already devastated and to
add
i mean in a in a covid relief bill to
put a minimum wage
uh that doesn't exempt small business in
any way is almost perverse
there you are so you nail that you are
appropriately cynical it is actually
much worse than just
stupidity it is deliberately designed to
help the big businesses
that increasingly dominate policy making
through their lobbying efforts and their
donations
and and i guess the same applies to the
immigration aspect
where it's the big businesses that want
to open the borders
um so they get more um low-wage
uh workers that's that's also part of
the same story isn't it
yeah there's a lot of debate on the the
effect of immigration on wages but
even the studies that show you know less
effect
in the in the lower wage occupations uh
there's a massive effect and it's just
it's just
obvious if you bring in a ton more
workers to compete for the same job
the price of the labor is going to go
down and and uh it's it's
the studies show that so uh yeah at this
time
uh again you know if you look at the
data on on the unemployment
the people who've been hit the hardest
are the low lower wage people and
especially people in hospitality and
entertainment
businesses and uh so this is
not the right time to open the border to
a ton more low-wage
immigration exactly neil thank you so
much for
putting that all so clearly um really
appreciate it good to see you tonight
thank you
thanks