Fifty years ago, Adlai Stevenson called the period in an election year when the Republicans abandon their purported principles and come to a temporary and uneasy truce with reality “the liberal hour.” That moment seems to have arrived. Whatever one’s views on the merits of increasing the minimum wage, for the House Republican leadership to schedule a vote on it now suggests that their electoral panic is deeper than they have let on.
I’ve been waiting for the first sign of Republican panic, and thought it would be Iraq-related, but this is a good a sign as any.
It would be a good sign if panic drove them to do something sensible. Raising the minimum wage scarcely counts as that. But I agree it is a sign of panic. Hopefully they won’t raise it enough to do too much damage.
I was going to post a rebuttal, but then I went and did some research.
Even Gene Sperling of the Clinton administration admits that raising the minium wage too much will result in layoffs of low end jobs. The issue is not about helping the low paid working joe, but about a wedge issue designed to help the fat cat Democrats regain power.
aka, Bad economics is often good politics.
Wow, RoseFeeder is back!
Yep — every economic analysis I’ve seen suggests that hiking the Earned Income Tax Credit is a better solution to working poverty than hiking the minimum wage. Now let’s see how eagerly Patrick and manapp embrace that idea.
Better than the government giving to the poor, how about they just stop taking away. Federal gas taxes raised by the Dems the first two years of Clinton disproportiantly affect the poor as they pay a greater percent of their income in neccessary spending. Also, like it or not, the poor spend a larger percent of their income on booze and butts than do the rich. If you want to help the poor, get rid of punitive taxes designed to make them make better lifestyle choices.
If you’re worried about taxes that disproportionately affect the poor, how about cutting the payroll taxes that Reagan raised?
Adlai was a loser–don’t get like Pauline Kael and claim that all your parents’ friends voted for him. Anyway, what do we call the days when the Democrats pass the Defense of Marriage Act, or denounce the Dubai ports deal, or attempt to prevent Maliki from addressing Congress, or whatever?
If a person working full-time is not paid enough to cover their basic support needs (food, shelter, clothing, transportation, health care), their employer is engaging in theft—of the employee’s time and of subsidies paid by taxpayers.
Whether the backfill comes from the taxpayers (as food stamps, Medicaid, housing vouchers, school lunch vouchers, EITC, transit passes, etc.) or the community (as homeless shelters, soup kitchens, public health clinics, food banks, waived hospital charges, etc), the employer is functionally passing off their labor costs onto the rest of us, regardless of us not receiving anything from the employer in return. This is legalized thievery.
Any employer who “can’t afford” to pay a wage sufficient to pay the basic survival needs of an employee working full-time is an employer who has a flawed business plan. There will always be employers who want something for nothing, and that’s the reason the minimum wage was created in the first place.
Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize the chintzy employers, and bad behavior on the part of stingy employers should not be rewarded with higher profits for them at the expense of those employers who pay their employees a decent wage; a minimum wage levels the playing field between them.
So let’s see — we’re supposed to help the poor by getting rid of gas taxes to force people to buy more economical cars at a time when the country desperately needs for everyone to do just that, and when we could provide the poor with the same assistance by just recompensing them for their gas taxes. And we’re supposed to “help the poor” by getting rid of taxes designed to discourage people from getting chemically enslaved to alcohol and nicotine, instead of helping the poor by providing them with money for their actual essentials instead. Why do I get the impression that manapp flunked his last IQ test?
As for Patrick: looks like the June bug has hastily left the porch yet again.
This just in: the House Republicans have now officially linked any minimum-wage hike to a large estate-tax cut.
http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-minimum-wage,0,4069400.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines
So that explains THAT move. Evidently they’re still more consistent than Mark thought.
“If a person working full-time is not paid enough to cover their basic support needs (food, shelter, clothing, transportation, health care), their employer is engaging in theft—of the employee’s time and of subsidies paid by taxpayers.”
What stark nonsense. How are we supposed to have rational discourse, if you feel free to redefine “theft” as meaning, “Paying less than Kathleen approves of”?
Just to illustrate how irrational your position is, let’s suppose that I was currently employed at a wage you found acceptable, working 8 hours a day. Suddenly, I decide I only want to work 4 hours a day.
Does my employer have to double my hourly wage in order to avoid being a thief? Is there any point at which the value of what I’m doing enters into the decision of how much to pay me?
The demand that the worst paid job out there be able to support a person, (Often you’ll hear the demand that it support a family!) fails to recognize that a lot of jobs are just entry level jobs taken by teens. Anybody who’s still working for those kind of wages even five years later has problems.
Basicly, you’re demanding that the bottom rungs of a ladder be cut off, because they’re not high enough to reach where you think people ought to be. But how are they supposed to start climbing, if they can’t reach the first rung?
Brett is excatly right. Companies who don’t provide their full-time workers with sufficient resources (pay, health insurance, etc.) to get by without relying on taxpayer-funded assistance aren’t thieves.
They’re freeloaders.
Shorter Brett: “Just to illustrate how irrational your position is, let’s” misstate it.
It’s not a deep enough panic that they are dropping the bull$shit that guarantees “the rich get rich and the poor get poorer”.
Rather thando the right thing, they want to create a trap for Democrats so that they can say “See? They voted against a wage hike!” See? They never stop plopping elephat turds — it’s the nature of the beast.