Iowa Republican and U.S. Senate candidate Joni Ernst has been very clear about her opposition to raising the minimum wage, and now audio has surfaced from a 2013 radio interview that reveals an Ernst close to Mitt Romney’s 47 percent territory:
“What we have to do a better job of is educating not only Iowans, but the American people that they can be self-sufficient. They don’t have to rely on the government to be the do-all, end-all for everything they need and desire, and that’s what we have fostered, is really a generation of people that rely on the government to provide absolutely everything for them. It’s going to take a lot of education to get people out of that. It’s going to be very painful and we know that. So do we have the intestinal fortitude to do that?…
Let’s take Ernst at her word: She’s talking about inflicting pain, explicitly. But it’s okay, in her telling, because these are people who “rely on the government to provide absolutely everything for them,” so the pain will be educational.
Bear in mind that when we talk about people on government assistance, that group includes many who work but are not paid enough or given enough hours to support their families, and that Joni Ernst opposes raising the minimum wage because she believes it is enough to live on in Iowa. By contrast, just 18 percent of Iowa voters think they could support a family on $7.25 an hour, and reality tells us you would have to work 73 hours a week at minimum wage to afford a two-bedroom apartment in Iowa.
“We’re looking at Obamacare right now. Once we start with those benefits in January, how are we going to get people off of those? It’s exponentially harder to remove people once they’ve already been on those programs…we rely on government for absolutely everything. And in the years since I was a small girl up until now into my adulthood with children of my own, we have lost a reliance on not only our own families, but so much of what our churches and private organizations used to do. They used to have wonderful food pantries. They used to provide clothing for those that really needed it. But we have gotten away from that. Now we’re at a point where the government will just give away anything.”
In reality, food pantries are not some relic of the past. They are very much with us, though they don’t get the kind of philanthrophy from millionaires that prestige institutions like operas and museums get, and they run out of food when the government cuts nutrition assistance programs. Because food banks are meant for emergencies and cannot keep up with a system where there are not enough jobs to go around, many jobs don’t pay enough to live on, and the government slashes aid.
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Do you want to live in a Mitt Romney-47-percent, Joni Ernst-pain-inflicting America, or do you want to fight back for people struggling to get by in an economy without enough jobs or high enough wages?
