Posted by
Dave on Thursday, July 20, 2006 3:12:24 PM
Since I plan to run for a local office one day in the not too distant future, I’ve often thought about what my “vote-buying” scheme will be. It seems that in order to have success in politics, you absolutely must have a plan to buy votes.
Right now I’m seriously considering the “raise-minimum-wage” scheme. I mean, who DOESN”T want more money? Of course, the first thing I have to do is to get my salary linked to minimum wage somehow; I’m thinking union. Is there a union for general managers? Anyway, this scheme seems to work really well. The main thing you need to consider when buying votes is that you want to make sure that the number of people you will inevitably alienate is smaller than the number of people whose votes you’re trying to buy. The raise-minimum-wage scheme does just that.
There will always be more workers than business owners. Well, truth be told, there will always be more ignorant, government-educated voters than knowledgeable, responsible citizens. So when you hurt business and the economy at large, you really don’t have to worry about the next election cycle because you have a) all the employees who are too young, unskilled, or uneducated to earn more than minimum wage, and b) all the other government-educated voters who don’t understand economics and think that you just helped end poverty.
However, you have to be very careful and ensure you get good media coverage. If you’re going to use this scheme, you really can’t afford to have people out front trying to “inform” the general population. You have to convince voters of a few things: it’s normal to make minimum wage, supporting a family of three on minimum wage is well within reason, it’s ok to drop out of high school before ever learning English or Math, having a poor work ethic won’t hinder success, you will always earn minimum wage (raises are for greedy white men), and if for some strange reason they’re here illegally, you have to let them know that they’re included too and they’ll probably be able to vote next time around. Otherwise people may actually think they have to get an education, work hard, be legally eligible to work, and earn enough to support a family before having children. What a mess that would be.
I’m pretty excited about this vote-buying plan. I know it works in reality because
some politicians have used it as part of their overall plan to stay in office since before I was born. I only foresee one real problem with the raise-minimum-wage scheme. It can only be used every few years, and unfortunately for me, the North Carolina politicians just
used it last week.
Ya'll come back now, ya hear!