Minimum Wage Hoax

[WillieDee]

St. Pete Times: Minimum Wage Hoax

The minimum wage's buying power is at its lowest point in a half-century, but the integrity of House Republicans can't be much higher. The hoax they played at 1:30 on Saturday morning - passing a wage increase they don't intend to become law - takes election-year deception to new depths.

The minimum wage, for the record, hasn't increased in a decade precisely because President Bush and congressional Republicans have no interest in it. In just the last month, Senate Republicans rejected an increase, and House Republican leaders buried an appropriations bill after it was amended in committee to include an increase.

So the vote early Saturday was just for show. House leaders emerged from closed-door meetings with a bill that pairs a minimum-wage increase for 6.6-million working Americans with an estate tax cut for 7,500 of the nation's wealthiest families. The estate tax cut, which would add $268-billion to the deficit over the next 10 years, has virtually no chance of passing in the Senate. Democrats in the Senate will not accept this extortion. As Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., put it: "It's political blackmail to say the only way that minimum wage workers can get a raise is to give tax giveaways to the wealthiest Americans."

The point of this exercise in political absurdity was to allow 196 House Republicans to vote yes on a bill that pretends to support an increase in the minimum wage. They did it because Democrats have prepared a potent comparison for voters this fall: In the 10 years in which Republicans in Congress have refused to raise the minimum wage, they have increased their own pay by $35,000. That increase computes to more than three times the annual pay of a worker earning $5.15 an hour, the minimum wage.

SNIP

[fasttense]

1. They think the American public is stupid.

"The House, which has taken so much time off this year that it may end up working fewer days than the infamous "do-nothing" Congress of 1948, thinks it can persuade working Americans that suddenly it cares. But the facts have a way of speaking for themselves. By the end of this calendar year, the minimum wage will have remained unchanged for the longest period since its creation in 1938. This is callous disregard of historic proportion."

The only war our congress and the bushes are winning is the war against the American middle class.

[underpants]

2. "Republicans muscled a minimum wage raise through the House yesterday."

That was how our local CBS affiliate described it.

Amazing.

[Skittles]

3. republicans being self-serving fucking assholes

gee, THERE'S a stretch