Hopefully, the White House is already looking at this list. This suggests what a path to passage of Obama's higher minimum wage law will take. In the House this would be more than enough to get it passed. In 2008, Paul Ryan didn't ultimately vote for it but did voice support in principle: he complained that it didn't give enough tax breaks to businesses to soften the blow he imagined it being.
"A ThinkProgress analysis finds that at least 67 Republicans who are still in Congress today backed an increase in the minimum wage in some form, including Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI).
Political momentum for an increase began in 2004, after President Bush announced his support for a bill by now-Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). After Democrats won majorities of the House and Senate in the 2006 elections, a minimum wage increase became one of their first priorities. The Fair Minimum Wage Act — which also included tax cuts for small businesses — passed the House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support. When the increase was folded into a larger appropriations bill, it again passed with strong bipartisan support and was eventually signed into law by Bush. 26 House Republicans even signed a letter to then-House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), asking for a vote on a minimum wage increase, including current Representatives Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Peter King (R-NY), Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ), Christopher Smith (R-NJ), and Fred Upton (R-MI). In incremental stages, the law raised the minimum wage from $5.15-per-hour to $7.25."
"Though Ryan ultimately voted against the measure, he argued that he supported raising the hourly rate as long as it came with a suitable “offset” of small business relief. “Last year, I supported an increase in the minimum wage because it also included tax relief measures for employers to offset the cost of the proposed minimum wage increase,” he noted in a floor speech, as he announced “with great regret” that he could not back the bill without more small business tax cuts.
Like most Republicans, however, Ryan struck a far more defiant tone in response to Obama’s proposal, dispensing of any caveats and telling CNN that “I think it actually is counterproductive in many ways. You end up costing jobs from people who are at the bottom rung of the economic ladder.”
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/02/15/1601831/65-republicans-supported-increasing-the-minimum-wage-when-bush-was-president/
So Republicans have voted for it before. Will opposition to Obama stop them this time? I doubt it. Again, in the post Hastert Rule era we've seen important legislation get through the House as Boehner lets it come up for a vote. So we saw both the fiscal cliff and Sandy relief pass with overwhelming Democratic support and just enough Republican support. In the case of Sandy relief this was only twenty something GOP reps-I suspect that the just Senate passed Violence Against Women Act will follow this trajectory as will universal background checks.
At the end of the day it's much harder to vote against minimum wage bills than Republican rhetoric suggests. They know they will pay at the ballot box if they fail to support it.
Incidentally, I see that Bob Murphy's initial rant against the minimum wage hike proposal wasn't even written, he just posted a video of himself arguing against it. He used an argument I've seen used before, but it's still not a very good one.
A $9 minimum wage won't be a good thing because if it was then why not raise it to $100 an hour? This commits the fallacy though that there can never be too much of a good thing.
You take two aspirins and you say you feel better but you don't really-how could you? If you do then why not take 100 aspirins? Sure 2 aspirins is not as bad as 100 but it's still bad! It may not kill you all the way like 100 but it will still kill you!
http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2013/02/thoughts-on-president-obamas-sotu-call-for-a-9-minimum-wage.html
Is even he a little embarrassed by this argument and this is why he doesn't have it in writing?
UPDATE: I do see he finally has decided to "get empirical" about the minimum wage. Glad someone who's against it is going to try this. His new try seems to be to just look at the youth employment rate and he's put together some numbers that supposedly show its mostly higher in states that have minimum wage laws.
Youth unemployment of course is always going to be higher and the most important effects of it aren't for this group in any case. It's been argued by other opponents of the minimum wage that it's not so effective in helping the poor anyway as a lot of it benefits middle class teenagers, so the argument over youth unemployment keeps shifting, His chart looks to me like a hodge podge in any case.
http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2013/02/i-get-empirical-on-minimum-wage.html#comments
He has something on the right of the chart that says stuff like "from 1-5, 4 years, from 46-50 1 year." I hope this doesn't mean that he uses a different amount of years for diffeerent states.
The main reason for the minimum wage however is not to promote youth employment per se. If as Dean Baker argues the minimum wage had continued it's trajectory up until 1968 when it kept up with gains in productivity we'd have a minimum wage of at least $16 an hour. Obviously this would greatly reduce those currently in poverty: the official poverty rate after all is $14,500 per year.
No comments:
Post a Comment