Free Republic

WASHINGTON - Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to fast-track efforts to boost the federal minimum wage and could seek to bring a bill directly to the House floor in January. The new Democrat-controlled 110th Congress convenes on Jan. 4 and Pelosi of California has made clear that raising the federal minimum wage is a top priority she wants the House to accomplish in its first 100 hours of legislative business. The legislation is likely to call for phased-in increase in the current federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour along the lines of a proposal...

Hidden inside the latest Democratic spending bill is an $18 million taxpayer handout to American Samoa. How did that get in there? Read on for another lesson in the uncreative jobs destruction of the minimum wage. When Democrats in Congress increased the minimum wage in 2007, the U.S. territory of 65,000 in the South Pacific pleaded for its traditional exemption from the wage law to prevent job losses. But Democrats followed union orders and said that if multinational companies like StarKist, one of Samoa's largest employers, could pay its CEO millions it could afford to pay workers $7.25 an hour....

Like many football fans around the country, I recently tuned into a heavily promoted 60 Minutes segment on the uncanny ability of tiny American Samoa to produce a steady stream of NFL players. Although it was certainly interesting to learn how Pacific island warrior culture translated seamlessly into the disciplines of American football, and how the island's players adapted to the hard-scrabble terrain and poorly funded athletic fields, the most interesting aspect of the piece concerned economics rather than sports. In passing, the narrator mentioned that American Samoa had recently experienced major setbacks, both natural and man-made. Earthquakes and tsunamis...

January 16, 2007 PELOSI'S TUNA SURPRISE Economists of every political stripe agree that a higher minimum wage will cost some low-skill workers their jobs, says the Wall Street Journal. Even Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to understand this. Despite leading efforts to pass minimum wage increases, she granted a reprieve to American Samoa, which has a big fish and tuna canning industry, specifically operations run by StarKist and Chicken of the Sea. Both companies are headquartered in California, and StarKist's parent is located in none other than Speaker Pelosi's own San Francisco district. Democrats rediscovered the eternal economic truth that a...

House Republicans yesterday declared "something fishy" about the major tuna company in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district being exempted from the minimum-wage increase that Democrats approved this week. "I am shocked," said Rep. Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican and his party's chief deputy whip, noting that Mrs. Pelosi campaigned heavily on promises of honest government. "Now we find out that she is exempting hometown companies from minimum wage. This is exactly the hypocrisy and double talk that we have come to expect from the Democrats."