Economic justice, what a concept Andrew Cuomo
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo delivers his State of the State address and executive budget proposal at the Empire State Plaza Convention Center on Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2016, in Albany. Credit: AP / Mike Groll
When Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo decided to move to the political left, he wasn’t messing around.
If you closed your eyes at points during his joint State of the State/State Budget Address on Wednesday, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine yourself at one of Father Charles Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice revivals of the 1930s.
Cuomo, behind a podium, and with a booming, bellicose voice, preached to the oppressed as if evangelized. Excerpts of his speech are available on the Internet, but you really had to be there to get the full effect. Cuomo thundered, sounding far more like his father, the late Gov. Mario Cuomo, than Mario Cuomo ever did. At points I swear the room shook.
What most struck me, though, was Cuomo’s dramatic upping of language and concepts commonly employed by progressives today. It was a striking departure from the business-friendly Andrew Cuomo that New York residents came to know in his first couple of years as governor.
His attack on McDonald’s and Burger King when promoting a $15 minimum wage made me audibly gasp, “Holy Moly” (it wasn’t exactly those words) for their sheer radicalness. He took the concept of “economic injustice” to a new level.
I’ll let the governor, who was responding to criticism that it’s not government’s business to set wages, speak for himself:
“Listen to this. Companies that pay the minimum wage, like a McDonald’s, have full time workers who are still below the poverty level and since they are below the poverty level they still qualify for welfare and food stamps. That costs taxpayers, on average, $6,800 per worker. So McDonald’s is paying $18,000 and we are paying $6,800 to subsidize that worker. It is a subsidy for McDonald’s. It subsidizes their payroll by 40 percent. It is corporate welfare at its worst. I have not heard the opponents stand up and say ‘stop the McDonald’s subsidy, stop the Burger King subsidy, stop the small business subsidy!’ In New York State, we spend $700 million a year subsidizing workers just to McDonald’s and Burger King. $700 million a year. I say it’s time to get out of the hamburger business, pay people a decent wage, raise it to $15, join me in the fight. It’s what this state needs. We can get it done. We won’t stop until we get it done. Let them defend McDonald’s and the corporate subsidies to the big corporations with your money.”
In other words, McDonald’s isn’t just committing an economic injustice to its workers when it hires them at entry level — observing the current minimum wage in the process, mind you — it’s committing an economic injustice against taxpayers, too. Revolt! McDonald’s is sticking it to you whenever it hires!
Who knew ol’ Ronald McDonald was so pernicious?
Keep in mind that minimum wage workers make up just 2.6 percent of the U.S. workforce, according to The Pew Research Center; more than half are aged 16-24; 77 percent are white and 64 percent of minimum wage employees are part-time workers.
Cuomo’s remarks stem from the concept of “economic injustice” so cleverly promulgated by wordsmiths on the left over the past 10 years, and targeted mostly at the fast-food industry which many organized progressives seek to unionize. It classically makes the employer the enemy of the worker, and now, according to this governor, of John Q. Taxpayer.
The logic is astounding.
Maybe it is time for McDonald’s and Burger King to get out of the hamburger business — in New York.
William F. B. O’Reilly is a Republican consultant.
