As if the low-wage workers of America aren’t having a hard enough time making ends meet, Rep. Michelle Bachmann has now said that she would favor doing away with the minimum wage, if it would help to eliminate the nation’s economic troubles.

Minimum wage workers and all low-wage workers are at the bottom of the heap now. They are the most expendable and are usually the first to go in a downturn. Usually, they have no benefits and they can forget a pension or living decently in retirement.

Why would anyone target them to give up even more? Rep. Bachmann, R-Minn., is so far removed from reality, she apparently thinks that $7.25 is enough to support a family, and that punishing them with lower wages is a way to help boost the economy. Just the opposite is true, since every penny they make is put back into the economy, right away, and it’s usually the local economy that benefits.

She suggested eliminating the minimum wage last weekend, at the same time also suggesting that the corporate tax rate be reduced. Bachmann is in a virtual tie with Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, in recent polling for the GOP presidential nomination.

Bachmann is not alone. She has been emboldened by others in her parties (Republican and Tea), who have taken draconian steps to reduce pay, benefits, and pensions of workers. For now, they have settled for attacking public workers and their unions, but the rest will soon be under the gun. This is being done at a time when the unemployment rate has inched back up to 9.1 percent. It’s 40 percent in the black community, and the children of that community are not finding jobs for the summer, so their unemployment rate is 20 or 30 percent higher than that of their parents. So far, this is not a campaign issue of great importance.

On the Indian reservations, unemployment is astronomical and poverty on those often-sparse lands is a deadly condition. On the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Indian Reservation, one of the economically poorest communities in the United States, unemployment is at 80 percent, according to the group from Warren Wilson College (North Carolina) that made its third trip to Pine Ridge earlier this year to work and assist the people of the reservation. This is not an issue that comes up often among candidates of either party.

Compared to those who live in inner cities and on Indian reservations, workers who still have jobs are well off, but Republicans and many Democrats are hard at work to see that they have less expendable income.

Just this past week, the New Jersey Assembly passed a bill that will make government workers pay more of their pension and health care costs. The plan of Republican Governor Chris Christie to make public workers pay far more than their share of the burden of balancing the budget is coming to pass. Christie, along with other Republican governors, are loathe to close tax loopholes for Corporate America and the rich and to raise taxes on those who can afford to pay a little more in taxes.

They aren’t all Republicans. Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, threatened the public worker unions in New York with the layoffs of nearly 10,000 workers if they did not grant the concessions that he was seeking in their pay, benefits, retirement, and working conditions. The largest of the unions has reached a tentative agreement with the governor and has accepted non-paid furlough days in each of two years. He also has refused to consider raising the taxes on corporations and the rich and closing tax loopholes that cost government at every level billions of dollars each year.

The list goes on. State after state is going after the government workers. In many states and in many of the nation’s largest cities, workers in those cities are people of color and their unions are of utmost importance to them. Their unions have been the change factor in their lives and their union contracts have provided enough income for them to send their children to college and to put enough away for retirement, not to mention provided health benefits that allowed them to seek regular care and remain healthy.

Because public workers have these benefits, along with decent pay, other workers, especially in the private sector, have fallen prey to the repeated attacks of Corporate America and their minions in the Republican Party and Tea Party. Because of those propaganda attacks, fellow workers are demanding that public workers be denied decent pay, health benefits, pensions, and, even their very jobs.

The forced concessions in New Jersey were supported by a significant number of Democrats, who have been frightened into supporting a right wing Republican agenda, which has been pushed by the fringes of their own party. Rep. Bachmann, the head of the Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives, has been one of the most vociferous members of congress in calling for the elimination of social programs of the federal government, as well as those of state and local governments.

Since she announced a few days ago that she would seek the nomination of the Republican Party for president of the U.S., she hasn’t skipped a beat. She has, like so many Tea Party types before her, only offered the sketchiest of plans to solve the problems of the nation. In fact, her plans appear to be non-existent. In that, she is not too far behind the rest of the GOP’s field of presidential hopefuls.

Bachmann has become a celebrity of sorts for her gaffes and mistakes, which reporters are counting up on a regular basis. For example, she claimed on national television that the health care program known as “Obamacare” would cost 800,000 jobs and cited the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as the source of her information. The CBO did not say that, but only said that the health care plan would have a small impact on jobs.

She claimed that President Obama is responsible for a sharp increase in the number of government “limousines,” but the increase was ordered before Obama’s time. She also has obscured, if not lied, about receiving government farm subsidies. According to FactCheck.org, she claimed that she never received “a penny” of farm subsidies, but she reported the subsidy payments on her income tax returns in 2006, 2008, and 2009. Her version of the founding fathers’ opposition to slavery was wrong, even citing one of the early politicians who was not a “founding father.” Her list goes on and can only become longer, as her campaign for the GOP nomination continues.

Surely, though, her assault on the minimum wage, the last thread keeping many workers from falling into the abyss, displays among the worst and most callous (so far) attitudes toward those who are unfortunate enough to have to work at that rate of pay.

It’s hard to imagine that in a country that was once a beacon to the rest of the world that a person of such incredibly modest intellect as Ms. Bachmann could seriously think she is capable of running a state, let alone a country as complex as the U.S.A. Yet, there she is, and the scary part is that what passes for a free press is beginning to pay attention to what she says, no matter how wacky. The press has gone into its horse-race mode and, as usual, is not capable of paying attention to the issues. It’s as if there are no issues.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.