The War Against Small Businesses

ONE of the preeminent policy positions and goals of the Democratic Party and since the beginning of President Biden’s campaign has been raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15.00, a 107% increase. The claims from all across the left-wing is that a “living wage” will help with “erasing wage inequality” for all workers and millions “would be lifted out of poverty.” It is part of the century-plus program of workers’ rights and labor activism the Left has partook in, trying to maximize the livelihood of laborers throughout the World, and adopting increasingly radical, revolutionary, utopian, and unrealistic means and promises in the process. From the days of closet socialist Keynes, who promoted the inflation-loving policy of deficit spending, to the modern era of multi-trillion-dollar UBI, Medicare-for-all, and $15 wage plans, leftism has veered ever closer to these concepts. The “election” of the Biden administration has given the American Left an all-time high of socialist euphoria.

However, through all the so-called news and journalism that is pumped into the airways and distributed to a [shrinking] audience of millions, what is the truth about the $15 minimum wage? Is it actually this ingenious plan that will revitalize jobs, make the workforce productive again, and restore America’s economic prowess? No…not at all. I will not sugarcoat it. The $15 minimum wage scheme is nothing more than another leftist agenda that is soft on the ears (like “Medicare-for-all” and “student loan debt forgiveness”) but infeasible and fiscally impractical.

Despite the polls people will throw out there, such as ones saying, “Nearly half of small business owners support a minimum wage increase,” the fact is that public perception will never change truth, and the truth is that for many real small businesses the $7.75 wage hike translates into very big bucks, insolvency-causing bucks.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been hard enough on small businesses, and 62% of America’s 31 million small-business owners believing that the worst is yet to come. The approaching onslaught of economic “reforms” being championed by the Biden circus also has small businesses worrying, much more than what the mainstream media would lead you to believe about the situation.

The National Federation of Independent Business, which represents hundreds of thousands of small business owners, reported that 92% of its members oppose the proposed wage hikes. Unlike what left-wing media bullies would like you to believe, this is not because of some culture of greed or penny-pinching, but because of a culture of wanting to make a living, especially in the current climate wherein “one-in-four small business owners report that they will have to close their doors if current economic conditions do not improve.”

You see, Giovanni’s Pizzeria operates much differently than Walmart Inc.; Giovanni’s was founded three decades ago by a poor Sicilian immigrant inherited by his son and operates out of one location, while Walmart was founded sixty years ago by the son of a farmer that now makes billions of dollars and operates in over ten thousand locations. Walmart is a megacorporation that makes a half-trillion bucks a year, and paying all of its two million employees a fifty-grand salary would amount to over a hundred billion a year (yes, just a fifth of its total revenue); just paying twelve workers that much would cost Giovanni’s over 600 grand per year.

With practically no mention of a small business exemption on any of the airways or in any of the legislative drafts, it’s hard to believe the interests of small businesses are in the interests of the Biden administration. In general, macroeconomic terms, we can expect to see two million jobs lost through the proposed 107% hike in the minimum wage, adding up to tens of billions of dollars of economic activity and billions of man-hours (not really that good for economic strength). The most damning data of all is that, according to the University of New Hampshire’s Survey Center, is that 72 percent of U.S.-based economists oppose a $15 federal minimum wage.

That survey can be further broken down, and includes the more relevant discovery that “67% of respondents said that a $15 minimum wage would make it more difficult for small businesses to stay in business.” The Left was more than willing to listen to the “economists” who pulled it out of their you-know-whats that Donald Trump’s outstanding economic record was Obama’s legacy, so perhaps they’ll be willing to listen to this supermajority of economists who have strong reservations about their new policies?

Let me give you all a more practical example of how this works, or rather how this does not work, for small businesses. Let us use the parable of Antonio’s Pizzeria, a small family-owned shop operating in the suburbs of Newark. The shop receives 30 orders a day, receiving nearly $40 per order, for a total daily revenue of $1,200. Antonio works his butt off six days a week, 72 hours a week to make sure everything is running smoothly. His yearly revenue, after only closing business on Sundays, comes out to be around $500,000, including some busier days, catering, and other fundraising. He has twelve workers who work from 9 AM to 7 PM, paying them altogether $300,480 a year, himself expending an additional $40,000 for himself. The remaining >$150,000 goes towards procurement, maintenance, and advertisement.

What happens if Antony has to pay a $15 minimum wage? Every year he will have to pay $563,400 in WAGES ALONE! Taking into account the money he usually uses for other expenses, he is now operating 42.68% out of his budget and going deeper and deeper into debt every year. But, who cares, at least his workers will have a “living wage”! Well...that is until they are forced out of work when Antonio has to liquidate everything in order to make his OWN living. This is the problem at hand, that these economic utopists overlook the 91% of small businesses that are meagerly profitable and low-income, believing they can be placed on the same spectrum as the corporate titans that are Apple, Walmart, Google, and others that take up huge market shares of their respective industries. For a segment of our country that is responsible for nearly half of our economic activity, you would think either side of the aisle would have small businesses in their best interests, right?

            And that raises a very good question: why do these political big shots stray so far away from the policies that make sense for their constituents, especially if they make up tens of millions of Americans? Well, I for one am all for making fun of the government, of bureaucratic incompetency, and the goofs of inept legislators, but in the real world these satirical caricatures cannot be followed. Political operatives are very crafty and devilish and are more cunning and slick than most of us can realize. For those who are clearly being funded by lobbyists and listening to everyone but their constituents, we can – with quite some ease – deduce the true reason behind all this.

            In the wise words of All the President’s Men, follow the money. In the 2020 election cycle $24.5 million, $19.8 million, $10.4 million, and $7.2 million were given to Congress from Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook respectively. Google, which routinely and systematically suppresses political news; Amazon, which has a virulent vendetta against the industrious small businesses of the U.S. economy; and Facebook, which was slammed last year by a nationwide bipartisan anti-trust lawsuit for buying up smaller competitors and stifling competition. There are other contributions from other sectors, such as a whopping $156.8 million from Bloomberg (whose namesake you need no introduction to), $25.5 million from Paloma Partners (whose founder gave $21 million in 2016 to globalist-elitist-queen Hillary Clinton), and nearly $64 million from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which was one of the leading forces behind the Democratic surge in 2018 that saw the inauguration of a new era of globalist and socialist politics.

            The purpose exposing this money network serves is quite simple: when you pay someone, you expect them to do a service for you. So, when you have hundreds of millions of dollars pouring in yearly to line the pockets of the people who dictate how our country is ran – the donors ranging from monopolists to globalists – what service do you think they want? The goal is quite simple, and it comes from the sugarcoated dialogue of the World Economic Forum, the Swiss megachurch for the World’s chief globalists and plutocrats: You will own nothing, because everything will be owned and provided by the monopolistic cartel of megacorporations; you will have no privacy, because the shadow government will be watching your every move to ensure compliance to the global terms of service; everything will be a wonderful hedonist utopia, like Fahrenheit 451, you will have no satisfaction or identity, but you will be pumped with he chemicals to make you feel fulfilled by your overlords. Oh, and by you I mean you the middle-class nobody, I do not mean them, the elitists who will still be saucing it up with their buddies in Switzerland.

            Like it is in China, every action will be dictated by an omnipotent State indistinguishable from the rest of society, it will indirectly provide you with everything it determines you need through its cabal of state-sanctioned monopolies. China, Nineteen-Eight-Four, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World; we have been told and warned about this dystopia so many times already. When will we wake up to it? See that it always comes with good-sounding promises and lies, which immediately converts into totalitarianism upon the seizure of power.

            We cannot get things done when divided, and division – which hampers efficiency like no other obstacle – is what the Elite relies on to remain in power, think how the State kept power and loyalty in check in Nineteen-Eighty-Four by feigning a perpetual war that frightened and enraged everyone into submission. Capitalists, socialists, liberals, conservatives, modernists, traditionalists, all sectors of ideology can work together civilly – even if that does not necessarily mean agree – through democratic dialogue, dialogue they wish to destroy.

Yes, it all comes down – from something simple like a minimum wage hike – to this ageless war between populism and elitism, between liberty and slavery. We are on a train that is rapidly approaching a cliff, and we all have this decision to make: do we keep fighting over who pulls the brake, or do we swallow our prides and pull the brake together?