http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2353&ncid=2353&e=13&u=/csm/20050315/cm_csm/ychin<snip>
While Martha was settling in at home and Michael was holding his courtroom pajama party, another morality play was unfolding in Washington with far fewer cameras and commentary. The Senate last week shot down one bill and passed another - and the fates of those respective pieces of legislation tell us more about ourselves than all the programming on the E! network combined.
On Monday, the Senate defeated a bill that would have raised the nation's minimum wage by $2.10 over the next 26 months. The bill was defeated by the Senate Republicans, who argued that the increase would stifle job growth.
That's a legitimate concern, though one that doesn't seem to bear up to scrutiny. The last two times the minimum wage was increased, in 1996 and 1997, the unemployment rate fell in the following months. And the wage is in need of a bump - adjusted for inflation, the 1997 $5.15-an-hour wage is worth only $4.33-an-hour in 2005.
Senate GOPers noted that the nation was still coming out of hard economic times, and proposed a more moderate increase of $1.10 over 18 months. That wasn't an unreasonable alternative, but they crammed their substitute bill with so many antiworker provisions (restrictions on overtime pay and the ability of states to raises wages for restaurant workers, for example) that they knew it would fail.
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