MSNBC can't understand why Bill Gates isn't quite buying into their 'raise the minimum wage' schtick

"Raise the minimum wage" has become the left-wing battle cry as we head into 2014. The false pretense is that Democrats care deeply about "income inequality," Republicans are evil fatcats, and if you don't vote for Dems the country will be taken over by a cadre of rich bankers. Never mind that, under President Obama, the gap between rich and poor has grown to a level not seen since the 1920's.

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Democrats are here to save us and, to do that, they're going to raise the minimum wage. Herman has spent a lot of time on his show discussing why that won't work, so we won't bore you by going over it again. Suffice it to say; it's a false solution designed for no other purpose than to motivate Democrat voters. It does nothing to address any real issue, and will only make the situation worse. Yesterday, MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski asked Bill Gates about this very thing. By the looks on their faces, you can tell they expected him to be all for the Dems plan. Things did not go as they planned.

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"Just curious," Mika began. "What do you think about the minimum wage? Should it be raised? And should we want to see models more like Costco, where companies pay their employees a lot more than minimum wage?" "Well, jobs are a great thing," Gates replied. "You have to be a bit careful that if you raise the minimum wage, you’re encouraging labor substitution, that you’re going to go buy machines and automate things or cause jobs to appear outside of that jurisdiction. So within certain limits, you know, it doesn’t cause job destruction. But if you really start pushing it, then you’re just making a huge tradeoff. You have to say which are the households that end up benefiting. Is it much more the teenager in a wealthy household or is it that household in poverty? A lot of the problem there is that those people don’t have many hours. It’s not the actual wage level." Brzezinski tried to argue that it would benefit poor people working at fast food restaurants. She claimed that a lot of those folks came from impoverished households. Gates wasn't buying it. "It's 88 percent in non-poverty households," He said. "There is about 11 percent of those are from the poverty households. But, you know, these are complex issues. It’s not as simple as just saying, okay, raise the minimum wage." Poor Mika. As usual she just seems flummoxed. Nothing seems to be going her way lately. At least she can take comfort in the fact that she hasn't yet been forced to apologize for any bigoted, racist, or insensitive comments. That's just the rest of her network.

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