Well, If A Nobel Prize Winning Economist Says So...

 https://x.com/chrismurphyct/status/2070230760196624429?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

 https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2071408668244160617

" Wow,

@ChrisMurphyCT

. You just come right out and announce you are a racist... out loud. Not even trying to hide it. The minimum wage is one of the most racist policy instruments in American history, Senator — and you just introduced legislation to TRIPLE it. Congratulations. That is a special kind of brazen. Allow me to educate you, since your staff apparently has the historical awareness of a participation trophy. The minimum wage was championed by progressive eugenicists in the early 20th century — the intellectual ancestors of YOUR party — specifically engineered to price Black Americans, immigrants, and the disabled out of the labor market. They called those workers "unemployables." Princeton economist Thomas Leonard documented this exhaustively. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, heroes of the progressive movement, argued openly that a wage floor set high enough would function as "social cleansing." Their words. Not mine. Union leaders were more direct. They stated flatly that minimum wage rules removed "the incentive for employing the Negro." Primary source. Direct quote. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931? Texas Representative Martin Dies said it on the floor of the United States Congress — it is in the Congressional Record — "you cannot prescribe the same wages for the Black man as the White man." Southern Democrats pushed it through. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 — the law that created the federal minimum wage — excluded agricultural and domestic workers at the explicit demand of Southern Democrats, because that was where Black labor was concentrated in the Jim Crow South. Under a Democratic president. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman called the minimum wage "the most anti-Negro law on our statute books" in 1966. And here you are in 2025, in case you don't have enough of a leak in the think tank already, pushing it to $25 an hour. Let me do the math your speechwriter apparently skipped: $25 an hour is approximately $52,000 per year before employer-side payroll taxes and mandatory benefits. At that price, a 17-year-old with no resume and no work history is flat-out unemployable. Not because employers are heartless — because no rational business pays $52,000 a year for someone who requires six months of training before they produce a dollar of value. A 2006 review by economists Neumark and Wascher examined more than 100 minimum wage studies. Two-thirds showed NEGATIVE employment effects. Research in South Carolina found minimum wage increases reduced employment by 8.9% for teenagers and 15.5% for workers WITHOUT a high school diploma. The CBO estimated that even a $17 minimum wage would push 350,000 workers entirely out of the labor force. You want $25. Here is what $25 does: McDonald's finishes the kiosk rollout. Walmart doubles down on self-checkout. The young man or woman who needed that FIRST JOB to build a resume, earn a reference, and get their foot on the first rung of the economic ladder — gets absolutely nothing. No experience. No references. No second job. Just the welfare line. Which is, of course, exactly where a textbook snollygoster like you needs them to stay. Dependent. Desperate. Reliably voting for whoever promises the next handout. Senator, what have you ACTUALLY done for the people of Connecticut? Because this policy does not lift workers. It removes the bottom rung of the ladder, hands it to the automation industry, and calls the whole arrangement compassion. Quinn's Law Number One: "Liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent." Quinn's Law Number 25: "Liberals are great at giving away other people's money." But what do I know — I am only a science teacher who actually read the history and the economic studies instead of the fundraising email."