President Barack Obama’s various efforts to court the young vote have crystallized his offensive, albeit sometimes successful, strategy: banking on the stupidity of Millennials.
His efforts always follow the same path. He begins by trotting out star-studded celebrities like Amy Poehler and Zach Galifianakis. When star power fails to dazzle, the President then turns to lame, and at times insulting, comedy. Think pajama boy, where the administration characterized Millennials as low-lives sipping lattes in plaid, flannel onesies, all in an attempt to get youth to sign up for Obamacare.
Now, it appears the administration has added a third prong to its Millennial approach: promoting nonsensical policy it expects young people to buy hook, line, and sinker.
In early October—conveniently in the lead-up to a crucial midterm election—the administration released a document called “FACT SHEET: President Obama's Agenda for Creating Economic Opportunity for Millennials”. Enumerated among the President’s policy goals is “creating opportunity and supporting good-paying middle-class jobs.”
It’s a beautiful idea, but besides being highly unrealistic (recall that Millennials have faced double-digit real unemployment since the beginning of the administration), the means by which Obama proposes to attain this goal are simply laughable.
How does the President plan to create more middle class jobs? It’s intuitive really, at least by default Democrat logic: robust employment is achieved through (1) equal pay legislation, (2) increasing the minimum wage, (4) investing in infrastructure, and (4) “creating an immigration system that works” among other nonsensical policies.
How will granting amnesty further Millennial employment? How will yet another equal pay bill convince an employer to create more jobs? And how will a minimum wage increase spur job growth? All of these questions are left unanswered by the Obama “FACT SHEET.”
What’s more is that not only will these policies do nothing in the way of creating jobs, several of them would actually have a negative effect on youth unemployment.
Take the minimum wage. Empirical evidence confirms that minimum wage increases disproportionately affect youth unemployment. For example, when the minimum wage was increased from $5.15 to $7.25 between 2007 and 2009, teen unemployment climbed from 14.9% to 17.6%. As Evan Feinberg succinctly observed in the Washington Examiner, “Wages were reduced to $0.00 for 691,000 young Americans who no longer had a job at all.”
Moving on to immigration. While the overall, long-term effects of immigration on the economy rest on murky divergent studies, there’s simply no doubt that, in the short-term, amnesty would smother youth unemployment.
Christopher Matthews at Time concedes that amnesty would have short-term consequences: “[T]he vast majority of the economic literature argues that a more liberal immigration policy would be good for the economy as a whole… But it’s almost certain that in individual cases there will be workers who get put out of work by immigrant competition.”
In short, there will be people put out of work. Those people happen to be largely young people in low wage jobs, the same jobs several newly legalized citizens will be competing for.
Aside from promoting job growth policies that would actually hurt rather than help Millennials, the administration throws in a propagandist buzz word to court the females: equal pay. It defies commonsense to accept the premise that closing a nonexistent gender pay gap will somehow create jobs.
Nevertheless, the administration endorses this defunct logic because, for the White House, it does not matter if equal pay will actually achieve the end goal of Millennial job growth. It is a mere ploy to garner in the “victimized” young women. The backwards logic, sadly, is akin to saying “if we say the word contraception, the women will come running to the precincts.”
As for investing in infrastructure to stimulate Millennial employment, did the President forget his $787 billion stimulus earmarked for that very purpose? Despite this valiant effort, Millennials are still shackled with double-digit unemployment. And yet we are to believe this failed remedy is now the answer to our problems?
Taking the President’s policy proposals together, Millennials are left to conclude that Obama thinks he is talking to mindless, lockstep robots who will jump up in support anytime we hear the hollow promise of more jobs supported by defect logic.
On the contrary, Millennials have figured this President out, although entirely too late. This is why the Harvard Institute of Politics found 51% of Millennials who will definitely be voting plan to vote Republican on Tuesday. Moreover, this is why the President now maintains a pathetically low 43% approval rating among voters he won by 34 and 23 points in 2008 and 2012 respectively.
Millennials have discovered the fool that Obama takes them to be.
Who’s the fool now?
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