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Region: Right to Life

Rep. Ro Khanna, who graduated from Yale, has a net worth of 27 million dollars and has never run a business in his life, has said that "we don't want" small businesses that cannot afford to pay $15/hour, and has since doubled down on the comments.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ro-khanna-defends-small-business-comments-after-gop-targets-minimum-wage-remarks/ar-BB1dTRkk

(As per standard operating procedure, because a Democrat said something controversial, the headline is "Republicans pounce", the GOP 'targeted' and 'seized on' the remarks. That trend to make every Democrat misstep headlined as a Republican pouncing and every Republican misstep just be a straight headline focused on the GOP has gone from a somewhat amusing 'hey, look at that' to a constant ridiculous display of media partisanship, but that's beside the point.)

I mentioned this earlier when the proposed wage increase was brought up, but this just hammers it home: the issue has gone from one of debating economic efficiency to one of apparent open disdain and scorn for small business owners. Khanna, a multi-multi-millionaire who lives in a city with a median income over $100,000, has assured everyone that small businesses even in rural areas can "thrive" paying the wage, which he knows because of his extensive hands-on experience in small-town America from his career as a Yale-educated lawyer who married the daughter of a investment firm tycoon. As earlier mentioned, $15/hour is higher than the median income in the state of Mississippi. The wage in Mississippi is the equivalent of requiring a minimum wage of nearly $40/hour for 7-11 workers by Khanna in San Jose.

There is out-of-touch, and there is actively spiteful, and I think that boundary has been crossed. A man luxuriating in the top 1% with his elite education in one of the wealthiest cities in the country declaring that Bill's Bait and Tackle should be boarded up and cast aside because does not meet his exacting standards-after arguably the single worst year for small business in the history of the United States-is a microcosm of this ugly new political elitism.

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