Congress has voted to increase the minimum wage!
Wrapped into the Iraq funding bill (Are you kidding me? What does this have to do with Iraq funding?) is a provision that would bump the minimum wage up, incrementally, over the next two years.
Two things bother me here.
One, the claim that it’s going to help a ton of people with families is flat-out bullshit. We’ve discussed in the past numerous times how “working families” don’t make the minimum wage to begin with, and how people making minimum wage don’t tend to have families to begin with. Senator Ted Kennedy continued to make Mary Jo Kopechne proud by proclaiming it was the “proudest achievements of this new Congress.”
But even that by itself isn’t the whole story. Check out this stat.
The liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, a research group in Washington, estimates that 5.6 million workers – or 4 percent of the work force – earn less than $7.25.
Wait, what? 4 percent of the workforce earn less than the new minimum wage?
So what exactly did the Democrats accomplish?
And lest you think I’m picking on Democrats, there are another batch of idiots. We call them Republicans. Check this idiocy out.
Republicans had complained earlier that the tax cuts in the House and Senate bills that led up to the final agreement were insufficient, but the inclusion of the provisions in the Iraq war spending bill made it difficult for them to stop them.
“From a small-business standpoint, the House bill was a peanut shell, the Senate bill was peanuts, and the conference agreement is a single shriveled peanut. It is a missed opportunity,†said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
According to the National Restaurant Association, the last minimum wage increase cost the restaurant industry more than 146,000 jobs and restaurant owners put off plans to hire an additional 106,000 employees.
“A minimum-wage increase will cost our industry jobs, and the vital discussion of how to minimize this job loss is getting lost in the debate,†said Peter Kilgore, the group’s acting interim president and chief executive officer.
Seeing as we know that only 4 percent of the work force is earning less than the new limit right now, can we put that stupidity to rest too? This isn’t going to cost jobs. $4,368 a year per employee earning minimum wage is not going to break anyone.
Man… When you cut through the partisan bullshit there sure isn’t much of a story here…
MSNBC link via Slobokan
[tags]minimum wage, politics, employment, jobs, economy[/tags]