Ron Harris/AP Photo
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, center, listens to a speaker during a tour of a massive temporary hospital at the Georgia World Congress Center, April 16, 2020, in Atlanta. Kemp will allow nonessential businesses in the state to begin to reopen this week.
It should come as no surprise that the first two states to reopen their businesses are South Carolina and Georgia. The defining attribute of Deep South states, after all, is not just virulent white racism but a general indifference to human life.
In Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp—governor solely by virtue of his success at suppressing voting in the 2018 election—has decreed that barbershops, tattoo parlors, and other small businesses can open on Friday, with restaurants and theaters following next Monday. The Peach State has nearly 20,000 reported cases of the coronavirus and 775 deaths. In South Carolina, Republican Gov. Henry McMaster authorized a range of businesses to reopen yesterday, though 124 South Carolinians have perished from the virus.
Imagine all the money that Georgians and South Carolinians will be spending once business is open again! In South Carolina, after all, even the minimum wage is—well, actually, South Carolina is one of the five states that never passed a minimum-wage law. To its credit, however, Georgia does have a minimum-wage law, which is set at a munificent $5.15. In both states, then, the federal minimum-wage law sets the legal standard, and, thanks to the opposition to raising it that comes most emphatically from Republican legislators from the South, that standard is a whopping $7.25.
For that matter, the two Republican senators who raised objections to padding unemployment insurance by $600 a week were South Carolinians Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott. They complained that by making unemployment insurance payments adequate to ensuring survival, that might put too much money into workers’ hands, so much that they might not want to go back to work at the state’s semi-post-slavery wage rates.
In short, reopening business in South Carolina and kindred states might lower the level of worker spending and consumption to the normal penurious standards, though businesses’ revenue and profits would rise.
The Deep South goes Calvin Coolidge one better. There, the business of America isn’t just business, it’s profits—not wages, not benefits, just profits.
