She Must Be High: Rep. Barbara Lee Wants the Minimum Wage HOW HIGH?

"Fight for $15? Why not just make the minimum wage 50 dollars? Or a hundred?" That's what fair-minded critics of the minimum like me routinely ask, right before we point out that the actual minimum wage is actually zero — and that it prices people who need their first job out of finding one.

The weakness of being a critic of the minimum wage is that we make a dry, factual kind of sense that puts people to sleep. I caught a couple of you nodding off when I got to the part about the actual minimum wage being zero. Compare that to the He-Man Master of the Universe strength of literally any nitwit know-nothing shouting, "FREE MONEY!" like that late-night TV pitch guy with the dollar signs all over his jacket.

Enter, stage left, one Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) practically with dollar signs all over her jacket.

Rep. Lee is just one Democrat in the wide-open race to secure the California Senate seat previously held by sister Democrat Dianne Feinstein and currently held by placeholder Laphonza Butler, appointed last year by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Speaking in a candidate's debate Monday night, Lee defended her previous call for a California minimum wage of no less than $50. "In the Bay Area, I believe it was the United Way [that] came out with a report that very recently $127,000 for a family of four is just barely enough to get by,' Lee said. 'Another survey very recently $104,000 for a family of one, barely enough to get by."

ASIDE: It occurs to me that if California can lose congressional seats for driving residents away with the state's suicidal progressive politics, what a shame it is that we can't take away a Senate seat because everybody running for it is an innumerate moron.

Left unsaid? No one is supposed to support a family of four on the minimum wage. Hell, no one is supposed to fully support themselves on the minimum wage. Low-wage jobs are for first-time workers — teenagers who still live at home and need to gain the experience, work skills, and even life skills that lead to better-paying jobs.

(They need to learn to hate that FICA bastard, too, but that's a column for another day.)

And yet, at the debate, Lee insisted that people "Do the math."

OK, Congresscritter Lee, I did the math, but your constituents aren't going to like what I came up with. Wherever in the country I looked, using Mc-Menu.com, a Big Mac meal (regular, not Super Size) costs between half and two-thirds as much as the local minimum wage. There's a cast-iron relationship between what it costs to produce a Big Mac meal and what your corner McDonald's must charge for a Big Mac meal. So if California wants a $50 minimum wage, Californians had better get used to paying $25-$33 for a Big Mac with a regular fries and a medium Coke.

I get the feeling, and I'm sure you do, too, that Lee is counting on her voters being unable to do the math. That's exactly why Democrats sabotage public schools every chance they get.

But there I go again, making a dry kind of sense while Lee shouts "FREE MONEY!" to the huddled masses yearning to be kept.

That sound you hear is the gears spinning to life in yet another automated burger-flipping machine.