Editor,

This is an open letter to Congressmen Rick Larsen.

“I am writing this letter in response to your newsletter of Jan. 28. Like so many other positions you take on important issues affecting our country, you have this one dead wrong.

Your position in support of increasing the minimum wage is the worst thing you could do to an economy struggling to gain traction and recover.

History has demonstrated the minimum wage is the biggest job killer of all. What absolutely slays me is supporters of an increased minimum wage’s inability to answer this simple question.

If raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour won’t harm employers and is actually good for business and for individuals, why don’t we just make the minimum wage $40 per hour? Or $100 per hour for that matter?

It makes no sense to require a business to pay for a low-skill job what it could otherwise outsource or automate.

What you’ll see is a jump in unemployment among youth, minorities, elderly and disabled.

Your argument that there are too many college graduates working for minimum wage demonstrates nothing more than the simple truth that despite all your bailouts and government social engineering, you, Obama, and the liberal Senate have done nothing but harm our economy and reduce the number of good quality jobs, instead replacing the traditional American work ethic with new-age American apathy.

You and your colleagues in congress are going to continue to put more and more people on the government dole resulting in fewer and fewer people actually earning their way to prosperity.

Not only is raising the minimum wage sure to harm our economy, what’s worse is it harms the poor most of all.

Just like all the other entitlement programs you and your liberal friends have devised, it does nothing but undermine the value of hard work and destroy an individual’s chance at upward mobility. You’ve incentivized the wrong behavior under the guise of fairness and equality.

These tactics, and other social engineering policies have done more to harm the poor and lower middle class than anything in our nation’s recent history.

Rather than providing an environment in which individuals at the bottom of society’s socioeconomic ladder have a real chance to climb to the next rung, and then the next and the next, you’ve made it just comfortable enough for them to remain at the bottom, knowing that a voter with their hand out to you is a voter you can control.

Now that we have a president — who would more aptly be called a king — that rules by executive order, you may actually succeed in getting this through, but like Obamacare, you’re tying the knot that will one day hang your party.

Your position on this is extremely frustrating. I do wish you’d reconsider.

Jason Joiner

Coupeville