The Aff kills small businesses in rural and poor areas for whom $15 an hour is an untenable rate: turns their communities impacts. Their evidence fails to account for the difference in ability to raise wages between big and small businesses.

Sanders wants the government to provide guaranteed jobs at $15 an hour, plus benefits. His office did not, a representative demurely told Post reporter Jeff Stein, yet have cost estimates for this proposal.

Perhaps we can help the senator out. With two weeks of paid vacation, each worker would make roughly $31,000 a year. Add, conservatively, about $10,000 for benefits, and the total cost would be about $40,000.

The United States has between 25 million and 50 million workers making less than this total compensation package. Millions more are unemployed or fully out of the labor force. Assuming most of them did the rational thing and signed on, that would make for a $1 trillion to $2 trillion annual program — rivaling or exceeding our total expenditure on Social Security, with maybe Medicaid thrown in for good measure.

Of course, Walmart won’t just shut its doors; it will raise wages to compensate, keeping many of those workers in the private economy. In fact, that’s what advocates of a guaranteed job program really want: an attractive alternative that forces private employers to pay more.

Unfortunately, we can’t assume all employers can just raise wages at will, especially in poor rural areas, where $15 is often within striking distance of the median wage for all workers. In those areas, at the very least, the Sanders plan would gut local businesses, forcing even more workers into the guaranteed job program and depriving communities of the services they provide. Though at least the owners of those businesses would have the comfort of knowing that a $15-an-hour job awaited them, too.