Posted on 07/28/2006 9:31:35 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON - Bowing to moderates and seeking to defuse a campaign issue before leaving for vacation, House GOP leaders Friday planned a vote on a bill to increase the minimum wage to $7.25 per hour within three years.
The vote comes after almost 50 rank-and-file Republican lawmakers pressed House leaders — who strongly oppose the wage hike and have thus far prevented a vote — to schedule the measure for debate. Democrats have been hammering away on the wage hike issue and have public opinion behind them
"We weren't going to be denied," said Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-Ohio, a leader in the effort. "How can you defend $5.15 an hour in today's economy?"
It was a decade ago, during the hotly contested campaign year of 1996, that Congress voted to increase the minimum wage. A person working 40 hours per week at minimum wage makes $10,700, which is below the poverty line for workers with families.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said GOP leaders had yet to determine the specifics of the bill, especially what to add to it to ease the sting on small businesses and other constituencies, such as the restaurant lobby. Lawmakers were hoping to bring it up for a vote by late Friday night, but Hastert said he was not completely certain the vote would occur.
Rep. Howard McKeon (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif., chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, said Thursday that GOP leaders may attach a proposal passed last year that would make it easier for small businesses and the self-employed to band together and buy health insurance plans for employees at a lower cost.
That idea was blasted as a "poison pill" by Democrats and labor unions. The small business health insurance bill exempts new "association health plans" from state regulations requiring insurers to cover treatments such as mental health and maternity care. And opponents fear they would offer inferior prescription drug benefits.
Opponents of the idea also worry that the new health plans would skim healthier workers from traditional plans, thereby increasing the costs and pressures on those plans.
"It's outrageous the Republican Congress can't simply help poor people without doing something for their wealthy contributors," said Rep. Tim Ryan (news, bio, voting record), D-Ohio.
And Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called it a "political stunt" for GOP leaders to attach the minimum wage increase to legislation that's sure to bog down in the Senate. Democrats filibustered the health plans bill in May.
"It's a political stunt to put (the minimum wage increase) on a bill they know is doomed," Pelosi said.
Democrats have made increasing the wage a pillar of their campaign platform and are pushing to raise the wage to $7.25 per hour over two years. In June, the Republican-controlled Senate refused to raise the minimum wage, rejecting a proposal from Democrats.
It's long been clear that there is wide support for the wage increase in the House, but Republican leaders have a general policy of bringing legislation to the floor only if it has support from a majority of Republicans. Perhaps one-fourth of House Republicans support the wage increase.
Inflation has eroded the minimum wage's buying power to the lowest level in about 50 years. Yet lawmakers have won cost-of-living wage increases totaling about $35,000 for themselves over that time.
Lawmakers fear being pounded with 30-second campaign ads over the August recess that would tie Congress' upcoming $3,300 pay increase with Republicans' refusal to raise the minimum wage.
[I was speaking of the miners of old who were little more than chattel slaves]
Actually, so was I. I worked for a time in a nursing home in northern Wisconsin and quite a few of the residents (or their family members) were retired iron mine workers.
Great, and maybe the job you enjoy will be here for a long time.
I don't understand?
No $hit! It's quite obvious you don't understand. Try looking at it this way:
Employee: Boss, I need $5 more per hour.
Employer: Yea, will I need at least $5 more work out of you per hour to be able to pay you $5 more per hour.
Employee: Huh?
Employer: Your fired you lazy ass bum!
Employee: How am I going to feed my family?
Employer: It wasn't my problem before so it sure isn't my problem now is it?
Employee: I feel like an idiot!
Employer: Don’t flatter yourself. You were never that good.
What good is that if its part time??!
But it's not fairrrrrrr!!!
I support free market economics. Whether that's "unrestrained captialism", I don't know. I'm not an anarchist, and any form government is a "restraint" of sorts, so I guess not. But the issue specifically at hand here is minimum wage.
You asked me if I really "believe" what I've been saying. I wouldn't say I "believe" it so much as I KNOW it. I was an economics major in college and have studied these concepts in a great deal of detail. Your socialist rantings leave me wondering if you attended college at all. If so, you certainly didn't take any economics classes.
Yes! In terms of business transactions, we are objects. That's the important thing, that business and personal relationships are different things, and must be. Business deals are negotiated based on the selfish interests of each party. One wants as much money as possible for the least work; the other wants as much work as possible for the least money. Somewhere in the middle, they each find a place that is acceptable, though not ideal, and a deal is made.
In personal relationships, selflessness and sacrifice are very important, even critical. But you can't run a business that way, or you'll be finished. If you selflessly give all your money away in business, then you're out of business. If you pay more than market value for your labor, then it puts your business in a position of being uncompetitive, since your prices must be higher to pay the higher wages. With your higher prices, you lose business. If the situation continues for too long, you're bankrupt, and can't employ anybody.
The employer's first priority has to be the continuation of the business. After all, it's his income too. He needs to put food on the table for his own family first. If the government, or union, is going to force him to pay more than the business can afford for his labor, it just might put him out of business. It will at least decrease the number of people he can afford to hire. So, while he might have been able to pay 50 people to work for him, now he can only afford to hire 40 at the higher wage.
What happens to the other 10? They have no job at all now, thanks to the higher minimum wage. They can't negotiate to be hired at a lower wage, even if they wanted to, because it would be illegal.
A higher minimum wage increases unemployment. It hurts employment precisely at the level of the "little guy", making it too expensive for employers to hire more of them.
by that and with 50 years of observation it seems quite clear that men unless restrained will abuse other men... they will work 8 year old children 12 hours a day... they will pay women 1/3 that of men for the same job (notice I said same not equivalent)... they will house workers in shacks, they will toss out an injured man and replace him with a healthy man... an old man for a young... they will build for themselves golden mansions in pristine locals,and they wil do so thinking all the while that they are moral men
No I am no Marxist but neither am I a full throttled Libertarian either.
Amen, brother!
From the article:
"A person working 40 hours per week at minimum wage makes $10,700, which is below the poverty line for workers with families."
This is a completely false scenario...no one does this!
Mrs. R, you wrote 'That being said, the last thing I want is a "raise" in the minimum wage, which benefits no one but "govt." in the form of increased taxes on said increased wages"'...
Agreed! But does an increase also benefit labor union workers? I've always thought that was a big elephant in the living room...seems to me some unions have a wage "tie-in" to the minimum wage? Their hourly rates are set at "X" above minimum, rather than a specific negotiated amount, I think...oughta Google it I guess!
As a fellow believer, I agree with your sentiment, but add the following-
1 Timothy 5:8 "But if anyone doesn't provide for his own, and especially his own household, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever."
In Matthew 20, Jesus tells the parable of paying the 3 sets of workers hired at different times of day the same wage. His answer to the man who protests is this, "Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn't you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous.
The burden of provision, from a Christian perspective, is on the worker not the employer. No one owes any of us a job that will sustain us. We have to work for it.
This assumes that there is very little or no profit in the business. Which in most cases is not true. I say the guy keeps all 50 and does without the third house on the beach.
Are you an employer?
Are you saying, miners get paid minimum wage?
The parable you site is a teaching concerning God's unearnable grace and seems unrelatable to an employer's responsibilities to my thinking.
Of course employees do have responsibilities as do parents to take care of the family... but none of this lets the boss of the hook. He has a mandate - a command about his actions.
In many business ventures, there is little or no profit. That's why so many fail, and take the investors' money with them. That risk of losing everything is balanced out by the possibility of making a profit.
But you may be right, and some business owners certainly are greedy. But in the overall scheme of things, very few businesses are wildly successful. Even if they are, who are we, or the government, to force that employer to spend the money where we (they) want him to?
What if I think you should pay me more to work on your computer, and that you don't really need that fourth or fifth rifle? Should I have the authority to force you to pay me more?
It all depends on your point of view.
I suspect this will be a poison pill for the Democrats.
Not today.
No of course not ... I references the wages and conditions of the miners in this country before labor unions and safety laws and child labors laws and on and on....horrific stuff....
How do we know he has a third house on the beach? How do we know he's not struggling with a second mortgage on one modest home? Most small business owners struggle - I don't know where you get this idea that they're all raking in the dough.
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