Gov. Chris Christie, who is paid $175,000 a year by New Jersey taxpayers, making him the fourth-highest paid governor in the nation, took his tough guy act to the minimum wage Tuesday:



"I've got to tell you the truth, I'm tired of hearing about the minimum wage. I really am. I don't think there's a mother or father sitting around a kitchen table tonight in America who are saying 'you know, honey, if our son or daughter could just make a higher minimum wage, my God, all our dreams would be realized.' Is that what parents aspire to for their children?"

What a plainspoken truth-teller, is the reaction Christie was clearly going for with this. What a load of unbelievable crap, is the truth.

Forget the parent sitting around the kitchen table thinking about their son or daughter's wages. Many minimum wage workers—27 percent of them—are parents themselves. If these workers made a higher minimum wage, 19 percent of children in the United States would have a parent who got a raise. That means those children would benefit. Maybe they'd eat better. Maybe they'd be able to do school sports. Maybe they'd avoid the disruptions of having to move because their family fell behind on the rent.

With the average age of minimum wage workers being 35 years old, their parents sitting around the kitchen table thinking about their wages are not the middle-class parents of teens or recent college graduates that Christie is trying to invoke in our minds. If your child is 35 and making the minimum wage, sure, you'd like to see them make more than the minimum wage. But a raise from $8.25 an hour—which New Jersey voters voted in after Christie vetoed a minimum wage increase—to $10.10 an hour would make a big difference in the life of said hypothetical adult child of worried parents. Shoot, you don't have to be making minimum wage to think an annual raise of more than $3,000 is worth getting. I don't know, maybe at Christie's $175,000 a year you stop caring about a piddling $3,000.

Christie is taking the Scott Walker line here: Why are we even bothering with the minimum wage, they want to know, when I want people to make more than the minimum wage. They want us to forget about the people they'd leave behind, the people they aren't trying to get higher wages for. They want us not to think "wait, if you want people to make more than the minimum wage, then why are you against the minimum wage being more than the minimum wage is right now?"

The reality is that the minimum wage is a poverty wage, and poll after poll—in addition to that ballot vote in New Jersey—shows that voters support increasing it. Chris Christie, like Scott Walker, is out of step with his state and with America.