The House Committee on Education and the Workforce canceled a hearing on minimum wage hikes Wednesday in light of a report about homophobic and sexist blog posts by one of the scheduled witnesses — a San Diego State University professor.
Economics professor and Center for Health Economics and Policy Studies Director Joseph Sabia was scheduled to testify Wednesday morning before the committee against a federally mandated $15 minimum wage. According to Politico, the committee scrubbed the hearing at the 11th hour due to blog posts written by Sabia when he was a doctoral student at Cornell University in the early 2000s.
The blog posts have since been deleted, according to Politico, but can still be found via the internet archival website Wayback Machine.
“In gay sex, we have an activity that is clearly leading to disastrous health consequences,” Sabia wrote in one post, an attempt at a metaphor for campaigns against high-fat foods. “What rational person would engage in this sort of activity? There is only one solution — let’s tax it.”
In another post, Sabia suggests that young women on college campuses “are encouraged to be whores.”
A representative for San Diego State University said university officials were formulating a statement on Sabia’s blog posts.
According to SDSU, Sabia had planned to cite his research showing that minimum wage hikes do not lead to higher poverty rates but would lead to higher prices and “substantial” job losses.
“Proponents claim that this massive increase will fight poverty and help low-skilled workers to make ends meet,” Sabia said in his written testimony for the committee. “These are laudable policy goals. But the efficacy of a $15 minimum wage should be judged not by its intentions, but by its likely results.”
–City News Service