House Tries to Get Minimum Wage Unstuck from Congressional Quagmire

by Mike Hall, Feb 13, 2007

The House Ways and Means Committee yesterday approved a free-standing $1.3 billion package of business tax breaks to help move stalled minimum wage legislation out of Congress. The House approved the measure because of the likelihood that the same Senate gang of Republicans who killed a clean House-passed minimum wage bill last month would roadblock any minimum wage increase that emerged from a House-Senate conference without some sort of tax giveaway to business.

After it passes the full House later this week, the measure is expected to be offered as an alternative to the $8.3 billion in business tax breaks the Senate tacked on to its minimum wage bill. That move is expected to break the stalemate that has held the minimum wage legislation hostage since the Senate passed its tax-break laden bill Feb. 1.

In January, when the House passed its minimum wage bill—raising the decade-old $5.15-an-hour rate to $7.25—the bipartisan majority (315–116) agreed there was no reason to tie the increase to even more business tax breaks.

The message in the House vote: “It’s way past time to deal with the minimum wage. Any tax breaks can be debated on their own merits later.” After all, during that same decade, Big Business reaped the benefits of some $300 billion in tax breaks.

But Senate Republicans insisted their corporate friends and allies needed even more help, especially if forced to fork over an extra $2.10 an hour to the nation’s lowest-paid workers. Even though that was nonsense, as 650 economists and five Nobel Prize winners said last October—the Republican Senate minority used a filibuster and killed the clean, no-strings-attached House minimum wage bill.