The Democrats have no shame. When the rules don’t favor them they obfuscate, avoid, circumvent, and even ignore them.
An effort to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025 as part of the relief package was thrown into doubt after a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian late Thursday. The nonpartisan parliamentarian said that raising the minimum wage wouldn’t comply with the body’s rules for legislation passed through a process called reconciliation, which allows a bill to be approved with 51 votes but requires that it be closely tied to the budget.
Wall Street Journal
They don’t care about equal application of rules or law and they will do what ever it takes to shove their agenda down the nation’s throat.
Progressive lawmakers quickly called for Democrats to ignore the parliamentarian’s ruling or abolish the filibuster to raise the wage, both steps Mr. Biden has resisted. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, began crafting a way to spur companies to boost the rate they pay workers through tax penalties and incentives to conform with Senate rules.
Wall Street Journal
Because they are not able to put a federal minimum wage hike in a bill that is supposed to be for COVID-19 relief they are coming up with a cockamamie scheme to tax or penalize companies for not raising their employees’ wages to the level the Democrats demand.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) said Friday he was preparing a plan that would impose a 5% penalty on the total payroll of a large corporation if it pays workers below a certain amount, with the penalty increasing over time. The plan would also provide small businesses that pay their employees higher wages with an income tax credit equal to 25% of wages, capped at $10,000 per employer a year.
Wall Street Journal
Look at those gymnastics. The tax code is complicated enough and they want to throw in all this gobbledygook. And they just don’t care because they don’t have to run businesses. I dare to say that most of Congress have never run a business or had to make a payroll. They know what they are doing and they’re throwing it in the public’s face.
“We couldn’t get in the front door or the back door, so we’ll try to go through the window,” Mr. Wyden said.
Wall Street Journal
Here is a novel idea. If the Democrats truly want to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour then put forward a bill for that purpose and vote on it. Why don’t they do that? Are they afraid that it will be too obvious what it is for? Are they afraid if they don’t package it with other things that legislators will have to answer to constituents that own businesses? If they are so confident that this is what the citizens of the United States want then they should be able to pass a stand alone bill for this purpose.
They won’t. They can’t. They know it won’t pass. But they want it for their union voters because union wages are indexed to the minimum wage. This isn’t for the mom in St. Louis raising two kids working at a fast food restaurant or the dad of four working in a factory in northern Georgia. Those jobs will be eliminated through automation as wages rise. This is for the special interests that will return votes to the Democrat Party.
Oh, and by the way, the minimum wage, historically, is a racist proposal with the principle aim of pricing unskilled minority labor out of the market.
In practice, the mandated minimum wage in Davis-Bacon “was almost universally determined to be the same as the union wage,” wrote then-Harvard law student John Frantz in this 1994 article for the Foundation of Economic Education.
“Most major union construction unions excluded blacks. This was an effective tool to fight against what some legislators openly complained about, cheap black laborers from the south,” Frantz continued.
Representative John Cochran from Missouri laid bare the motivation behind the act when he stated, “I have received numerous complaints in recent months about southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics getting work and bringing the employees from the South.”
The Libertarian Institute
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay