A conservative columnist raged against the GOP Tuesday, hitting out after he said it made an ‘entirely irresponsible' policy shift to the left.
USA Today Columnist Dace Potas, president of the conservative college student group Lone Conservative, wrote, “Republicans in Congress have proved their fiscal policy to be entirely irresponsible.
He railed against GOP members who are “endorsing a higher federal minimum wage,” which he called “ill-fated.”
“The Republican Party is completely abandoning the market-based approach to economics that it had become synonymous with for decades,” he wrote.
Calling out Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), Potas said the Republican was “in cahoots with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), in proposing legislation that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, up from $7.25 an hour.”
Continuing to call out Hawley for abandoning GOP standards, Potas said the senator, “Has a history of opposing free market principles, including legislation capping credit card interest rates, opposing right-to-work laws, and now his endorsement of a higher minimum wage.”
Potas said true members of the GOP don’t want to raise the minimum wage, “because minimum wage laws are seen as an intervention into the market approach to wage setting.”
He added, “Republican elected officials are becoming more sympathetic to state involvement in the economy far beyond simply encouraging competition.”
“Nothing about these types of policies is conservative,” Potas wrote, “and they are damaging to the country and the Republican Party.”
Frustrated with Hawley and other Republican’s decisions, the columnist wrote, “For a long time, we had the prudence not to embrace policies that gave the state more say in the economy, but now Republicans are increasingly willing to do so.”
“Republicans are ditching the free market principles that made America wealthy in exchange for the Democrats' love for big government,” Potas said.
“All of this is happening because Republicans in the Trump era crave power rather than prosperity.” He added, “It's far easier to promise the government will fix your problems than to give people the freedom to fix them themselves.”
