You have to hand it to the Republicans some days– clever. They have finally decided to allow an increase to the minimum wage, the first one in seven years, because they must have done some polling and the mid-term elections are coming up. Then they combined it with a permanent tax break affecting a tiny percentage of the richest Americans, but which will result in a huge increase in the federal deficit. The tax break applies to estates over $5 million. This tax break is so attractive to the rich that their twit lobbyists, who normally fight every attempt to increase the minimum wage, have announced that they support this bill in exchange for it.
When they were opposed to the bill, their logic was this: when you increase wages for the poor, you make it more costly to employ them. So less of them will find work. So increasing the minimum wage hurts the working poor.
Gosh. They might be right. In that case, Congress should also place caps on the amount of interest credit card companies can charge their card-holders, or people will stop using credit.
The real sin of this contrivance is that the Republicans– the party of high principles and integrity, remember– have tucked the estate tax break into the minimum wage bill instead of letting each piece of legislation stand on it’s own as they should. This is sneaky, devious, deceitful, and immoral. When you hear people like Bill Frist explain why they are doing this, it sounds a lot like, “it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”
If the Democrats oppose the bill, the Republicans campaign as the friends of the working man, who tried so hard to raise the minimum wage but those damn Democrats– friends of those privileged, snobbish, educated, Eastern elitists– sabotaged it. If the Democrats vote in favor of it– even better. The Republicans can claim it was all their idea. In the meantime, their most ardent supporters get another massive tax break.
Watch the media the next few days. You will see numerous Republicans and their toadies popping up on the talk shows and newscasts using identical phrases and ideas to argue for the bill. This will be highly coordinated. It might work, if the Democrats don’t have the guts to trust the voters to spot a scam when they see one.
Oh joy — now we can turn Cuba into… Haiti. Those who celebrate Castro’s recent illness leave me with mixed feelings. Yes, he is a dictator and Cuba is essentially a one-party state, and yes he has jailed or executed some dissidents (though not as many as, say, Pinochet did in his prime). But if you compare Cuba to other similar nations in the region, it’s hard to argue that life for more Cubans would have been better if the CIA had deposed Castro in the 1960’s. It almost certainly would have been better if the U.S. had not imposed it’s embargo.