Ethics Jobs

Failing at Life

Erick Erickson doesn’t mean to be ugly but, if you have a job and you’re paid less than he is, you’re probably a failure.

“The minimum wage is mostly people who failed at life and high school kids,” Erickson said. “Seriously, look. I don’t mean to be ugly with you people. … If you’re a 30-something-year-old person and you’re making minimum wage you probably failed at life.”

Erickson dismissed the idea that some of those people may have just been down on their luck. “It is not that life dealt you a bad hand,” he said. “Life does not deal you cards. It’s that you failed at life.”

If you go back to 2008 or 2009, you’d find a number of formerly wealthy and employed people working minimum wage jobs because they, through no fault of their own, saw their jobs, savings and 401ks obliterated by Wall Street and the collapse of the mortgage-backed securities market.

Weren’t they dealt a bad hand? Did those people fail at life?

I seem to recall a time when conservatives believed that a job is a job and that if you have a job you’re doing what you’re suppose to be doing — working. But according to Erick Erickson, if you are over 30 years old and are, in fact, employed but being paid less than he is, you’re a failure.

To put that another way, Erickson believes millions of Americans are either failures or soon-to-be failures. They’re the 47 percent. This is the new Republican elitism. Simply being employed isn’t good enough.

Taken into context, this makes it easier to understand why Republicans oppose increasing the minimum wage. They believe you aren’t worth more money. And to be clear, increasing the minimum wage would ripple across the entire lower end of the wage scale, not just for those making the minimum.

I’d rather be called a failure than a Republican.