House OKs Minimum Wage Hike with Estate Tax Cut

The House of Representatives decided that the working poor in America deserve better than $5.15 an hour. It has passed a bill raising the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour to be phased in over the next three years. In the same bill is a provision to cut the estate tax, which will cost the Treasury $268 billion over the next 10 years. The Senate seems more fiscally responsible, wanting only an increase in the minimum wage.

The House, of course, doesn’t really expect to get its version of the bill passed. That isn’t the purpose of the 230-180 vote in favor of the legislation. Instead, the congressmen and women wanted to take their usual 5-week August vacation without having to listen to constituents complain that they hadn’t acted at all. After all this is an election year, and some of them will have to actually campaign to keep their jobs, which pay more than $7.25 an hour. Meanwhile, the estate tax cut is there to keep the very wealthy happy – indeed, it only affects 7,500 families.

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) has the votes to prevent the bill from coming to a final vote in the Senate. “The Senate has rejected fiscally irresponsible estate tax giveaways before and will reject them again. Blackmailing working families will not change that outcome,” he stated shortly before the Senate went on its multi-week holiday.

When the legislators return from vacation sometime around mid-September, it will be too close to the election for any of this to matter. The bill in any form is not going to make it to both floors of congress, through reconciliation and two more floor votes – not when there is campaigning to do at home. Instead, this will die quiet death due to lack of interest this autumn.

When Harry Truman won his surprise election in 1948, he did so in part by running against the “Do-Nothing” Congress. That assembly was far more productive than the current bunch, and when this crowd does anything, it usually hurts the country more than it helps. So, the minimum wage and estate tax issues will be there in January for the new congress. One might want to vote accordingly.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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