Nice Time! Fewer Working Minnesotans To Starve And Freeze To Death In The Streets! (Okay They Will Still Freeze In The Streets)

Are you ready for some afternoon nice time? Of course you are! How about the kind of nice time where people come one step closer to not dying in the street because they have no money even though they work all the time? That is one of the very best types of nice time! So let us tell you about frozen hellscape tundra Minnesota, which is being very nice indeed by raising the minimum wage. 

Gov. Mark Dayton plans to sign the bill into law Monday, starting Minnesota on a path in August from being one of the nation's lowest minimum-wage states to one of it's highest.

The vote, which raises the wage for large employers to $9.50 by 2016, with an annual inflation adjustment to start in 2018, was hailed by labor groups Thursday and praised by President Barack Obama.

While Minnesota deserves much back-patting and Bamz-love for this, let's take a moment to remind ourselves that we are singing the praises of a law that still results in full-time minimum wage workers making under $20K FOUR YEARS FROM NOW. We realize that there is dignity in hard work and it is its own reward and all that, but it is awful fucking hard to put food on your family for $20K. Of course, we are grubby little socialists who believe that people should be guaranteed far more than $20K to live on.

You will not be surprised to learn that while many people in Minnesota are nice and do not want people to be destitute, Republicans in the state legislature are not those people.

Rep. Steve Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa, said Moorhead and other border communities will suffer from unfair competition with such cities as Fargo in a state where the minimum wage is $7.25.

"North Dakota is going to zoom your district by," he told Rep. Ben Lien, DFL-Moorhead.

We are not even sure how that works. More people will go work in North Dakota because they pay less? The magical job fairy will bless North Dakota for keeping wages low? Businesses will pack up their factories and move 10 feet across the border to avoid paying a few cents more?

And let's not forget the concern troll approach.

Rep. Bob Gunther, R-Fairmont, a retired grocer, said he took pride in hiring high school students. But those jobs will be a lot fewer with a higher minimum wage, he said.

"A lot of people won't get that first line on their resumes," Gunther said.

Yes, because that "worked at the tiny grocery in my tiny town" line on the resume was really what was driving the success of high school students everywhere.

GOPers, just give up on this one. You are not on the side of the angels when you insist that the economy will topple over and die if you pay people enough to live on. Surely you can go be terrible about something else. Meanwhile, we'll kick back and raise a frosty beverage to frosty Minnesota for doing the right thing.

[ Pioneer Press ]