Progressives have such low expectations of people — especially Americans.

They believe that the average person wouldn't be able to feed himself and his family without federal subsidies, food stamps and a menu dreamed up by Michelle Obama.

I thought about this after clicking on a link to a story in the New Pittsburgh Courier headlined "Raising minimum wages wound be benefit economy."

"Raising minimum wages wound be benefit economy"? What does that mean?

It was so fascinating I decided to read the story to determine what on earth the headline was supposed to say.

(I was thinking of suggesting this as a technique to my editors at WorldNetDaily — write headlines that make no sense to draw the curious to click. I thought better of it when I realized the most likely explanation for this incomprehensible headline is that it was written by an editor making minimum wage.)

But that was just the beginning of my interest with this exquisite example of the low expectations of progressives.

Raising the minimum wage has become one of the top economic priorities of President Barack Obama's and the progressive class. They sell raising the minimum wage to people who have been conditioned by progressive education and progressive media to believe that the only way they can earn more money is for the government to extract it by force from their employers.

It's really sad.

Instead of painting a bold, forward-looking economic policy designed to create more wealth and maximize wages, the Obama progressive class seeks to empower itself with a permanent economic underclass dependent on the good graces of politicians to get them subsistence wages.

Who wants subsistence wages? Who wants to make a "minimum wage"? Shouldn't all Americans want to maximize their wages?

This is the essential difference between a party and ideology based on "spreading wealth around" and a worldview that seeks to create more wealth, bake a bigger pie and grow the economy so that all boats are lifted.

I can only surmise from this story in the New Pittsburgh Courier that even the lumpenproletariat must be catching on to the progressive scam of minimum wages. Why? Because this story actually provides a new reason for pushing the minimum wage — one I've never heard before and one that is even more bizarre than selling low wages rather than high wages.

The lead of this story says, "Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would likely save taxpayers $39 billion in spending on safety net programs per year, according to a new issue brief by the Economic Policy Institute."

There's one massively deceptive falsehood contained in that sentence: The federal government will not "save" taxpayers money as long as it borrows a third of the money it spends — or, stated another way, spends 30 percent more than it takes in from taxes.

There's a second massively deceptive falsehood contained in that sentence: Raising the minimum wage always results in more joblessness; thus, it could never lower demand for safety net programs.

How do progressive outfits such as the EPI come up with these theorems? Simple! They make them up out of whole cloth. None of it makes any economic sense — any more than did the economic theories of Karl Marx and Josef Stalin.

Maybe the headline wasn't a mistake after all. Perhaps I just didn't understand what the headline writer was trying to say.

Let's take another look: "Raising minimum wages wound be benefit economy."

Maybe the editors had a moment of lucidity. Maybe they indeed do recognize that raising the minimum wage, though sounding as if it would do something for the economy and the poor, would actually be a mortal "wound."

Could it be?

To find out more about Joseph Farah and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.