Senate Democrats block minimum wage hike

Contributed by: filbert Friday, August 04 2006 @ 11:36 AM CST

From Yahoo News:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic senators blocked their own goal on Thursday of raising the U.S. minimum wage for the first time since 1997 after Republicans added a huge tax break for the rich to the legislation, actions sure to reverberate in this election year.
. . .
The Republican plan would have eventually excluded estates valued at up to $5 million per individual, or $10 million for married couples, from any taxes.

Estates over $5 million to $25 million would have been taxed at 15 percent and anything over $25 million at 30 percent.

Now, I tend to think the minimum wage is a meaningless, borderline-harmful meddle in a routine economic exchange, but I don't really lose sleep over it one way or another.

Even so, I have come to expect no more of Democrats than cynically blocking the wage hike (which allegedly helps the poorest workers in the economy) in order to preserve the issue for the Fall elections while also perpetrating class warfare by opposing the trivial estate tax reform.  Considering that "the rich" pay 90% of taxes right now, any tax break "helps the fat cats."

In other news, tax breaks work.

So what do you do if you want to grow the economy, provide more jobs, provide better jobs?

What you do is cut taxes, you don't raise the minimum wage.  This is unfortunately too abstract for many people (most of them Democrats) to understand.

Medary.com - Senate Democrats block minimum wage hike
http://www.medary.com/article.php/20060804123629285