Jon Stewart tangled with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) over Tea Party economics, in between the comedian’s theatrics and a couple jokes from the senator.
Sparring over the minimum wage and Rubio’s proposal of an earned income tax credit on Tuesday night’s episode of “The Daily Show,” Stewart pushed the senator to embrace both.
“Let’s do this earned income tax credit thing, and raise the minimum wage,” Stewart said. “Suddenly you have an enormous group of people that raise themselves out of poverty.”
Rubio shook his head, saying that the minimum wage would cause companies to opt for machines over paying more for employees. The senator threw in a quip that new technologies will be better than low-wage workers.
“It will not be a person taking your order, there will be a touch screen there that you will order from and when you get to the window the order will be right,” Rubio joked.
To mixed laughter and groans from the audience, Stewart rolled his chair away from Rubio, pointed and yelled, “shun him!”
Rubio said his point was that the minimum wage would cause businesses to move to that technology sooner.
“They’re gonna move to that new technology anyway,” Stewart said, “because corporations are people, but they’re sociopaths.”
Watch the interview, courtesy of Comedy Central:
Most quotable line of the week.
Rubio is another repub joke, revoke his citizenship.
Sadly, the direction we are going is in the replacement of people with technology. It isn’t a recent event, but has been going on for at least a decade, maybe longer. I can’t criticize Rubio for this opinion because he’s correct. Not overly fond of him, but I have been first-hand witness to this in my worklife for the last 20 years. It is no longer anecdotal. And it’s why education is failing the younger generations because there will be less and less hands-on work and more and more technical support (programming, computer-usage) in business.
Gone are the days when a kid with a low-level class rank can graduate high school with minimal skills and just get a job running a machine in a manufacturing environment and expect to have a job for life. Those days are absolutely gone.
I’ve never liked Rubio - and I love Stewart - but Rubio scored a whole lot of points in that interview last night and even did a decent job of reconciling his ideas with the tea party “philosophy.” Stewart exaggerated what most tea partiers have to say about government, and it gave Rubio an opening.
But as with immigration, I’m sure Rubio will find a convenient reason to backtrack.
Senator Rubio; proud of his ignorance, and not afraid to show it off on national television. He just doesn’t get it, does he? I’m sure there’s a nice warm seat in the clown car for this idiot, but he, like so many others, will NEVER be elected President of this country. Cognitive dissonance; it’s what’s for dinner!