Wages of fear

For five years Trump has been utterly incoherent on the subject of the minimum wage. That didn't change in last night's debate.

During last night’s presidential debate, the most-searched words on Google were “wages” and “unemployment,” according to NBC News. That can’t be good news for Donald Trump. “Wages” was the most-searched word in 44 states, and “unemployment” in six.

The unemployment rate is, at 7.9 percent, about double where it stood before the Covid emergency. That is, one hopes, a short-term effect of the Covid lockdown. But wage growth was sluggish for a decade after the Great Recession of 2007-9. Wages finally started rising at a decent pace in 2019, thanks to unemployment continuing to fall on Trump’s watch, and the biggest gains were at the bottom, almost certainly because of state-level minimum wage increases. (A huge wage spike in April was attributable to Covid very suddenly putting a lot of minimum-wage workers out of a job.)

But when Trump brags about economic growth prior to the Covid recession, he seldom mentions wages; he prefers to talk about job growth. That’s probably because, for all his professed concern for working people, he worries like any other businessman about the cost of labor.

The thing that prompted all this Googling of “wages” during the debate was a question about raising the minimum wage. Biden favors raising it to $15. Trump favors … well, it’s complicated. Trump has taken more contradictory positions on whether to increase the minimum wage than perhaps on any other issue—so much so that in 2016 Michelle Le Hee Yee of the Washington Post published a guide to all of them.

Do you have a minute?

Trump’s initial (and likely most sincerely felt) stance when he ran for president last time was that the minimum wage shouldn’t be increased, because U.S. wages were already too high to compete with other countries. That’s not a very smart thing even for a Republican politician to say, and he got barbecued by Bernie Sanders and others for saying it.

Later Trump clarified that he meant only that the minimum wage was too high, and called Sanders a liar for saying he’d said wages were too high. That was itself a lie, because Trump had said at least twice that U.S. wages were too high, in neither instance specifying that he meant only the minimum wage.

After that, Trump said a few times that he opposed a minimum wage hike.

That was unpopular, too. Polls consistently show a large majority of Americans (including a sizable minority of Republicans) favor a minimum wage increase. So Trump reversed himself and said he was open to raising the hourly minimum an unspecified amount above the (still-current) $7.25.

But now the business lobby was unhappy. So Trump said “I’d rather leave it to the states.” He probably thought that was the way to duck the issue. But his words were interpreted, very plausibly, to mean that he didn’t favor a national wage minimum at all. When Elizabeth Warren accused him of that, Trump called her a liar.

That takes us to late July 2016. By now the primaries and the GOP convention were behind him and he was running in the general against Hillary Clinton, who’d come out for a $12 hourly minimum So Trump threw in the towel and said he would favor raising the hourly minimum at the federal level to $10.

He didn’t really mean it. We know that because he dropped the matter entirely after he became president. For a moment this past July it looked briefly as though that might change. Another general election was coming and Trump’s poll numbers were sinking. So Trump announced that within two weeks he’d have a statement on the minimum wage. Because that’s what you do in July, right?

But like Trump’s phantom health care plan, the minimum wage statement never materialized. My guess is that National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow talked Trump out of it. (Kudlow hates the minimum wage more than any human alive.)

Which brings us to last night’s debate.

Kristen Welker of NBC News, the moderator, asked both candidates about their positions on a $15 wage minimum. Biden reaffirmed his support for the increase. Trump ran through a sort of greatest hits compendium of his previous contradictory positions.

First he said, “How are you helping your businesses when you’re forcing wages?” So, no minimum wage hike.

Then he said, “I would consider it to an extent .… But not to a level that’s going to put all these businesses out of business.” So, some small, unspecified minimum wage hike.

Then he said, “It should be a state option.… They’re all different. Some places, $15 is not so bad. In other places, other states, $15 would be ruinous.” So, no federal minimum wage at all, just like Elizabeth Warren said (and as Kudlow desires).

A more generous interpretation would be that Trump meant whatever increases were warranted should be imposed at the state level. But that would be a bit like opining that the sun ought to rise in the east, because since 2016, while Trump has sat on the issue in Washington, half the states have raised their wage minimums (though none yet to $15).

Why were so many people Googling “wages” last night? Maybe they were trying to figure out what the hell Trump’s position on minimum wage really is. The only honest answer is that he still doesn’t have one, and at this late date, he probably never will.