Republican Policy Preferences
By 
Remember folks, Republicans hate you and don’t care if you live or die.
Five days ahead of the midterm elections, President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser took to trashing the minimum wage.
“My view is a federal minimum wage is a terrible idea ― terrible idea,” Larry Kudlow, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said in an interview with Washington Post Live on Thursday.
The federal minimum wage has been on the books since the Great Depression to prevent employers from paying exploitative wages. It is currently set at $7.25 per hour, which translates into an annual salary of about $16,000 for a full-time worker. Polls show that voters on both sides of the aisle not only approve of the concept of a minimum wage, they wish Congress and the White House would raise it.
But the man leading the president’s economic team is no fan. Kudlow noted, correctly, that the cost of living varies widely from state to state, and that “Idaho is different than New York. Alabama is different than Nebraska.”
“That’s why the federal minimum wage doesn’t work for me,” he said.
But Kudlow did not endorse the idea of states or localities raising their own minimum wages as they see fit, in lieu of a federal mandate. As a supply-sider who doesn’t like regulations to interfere with the labor market, he did the opposite.
“I would argue against state and local [increases],” Kudlow said. “But that’s up to the states and localities.”
Kudlow is the kind of guy who watches Make Way for Tomorrow and then advocates to eliminate Social Security.