Media-Sanctioned Theft

The Boston Globe got all in a huff over the defeat of legislation last week that would have raised the minimum wage. Republican chicanery is of course to blame, not the fact that the Dems refused passage of a pet issue when forced to compromise it with passage of a similarly-favored Republican issue, tax cuts.

From the Globe: A MINIMUM WAGE increase, the first in nearly a decade, got sidetracked yet again on Thursday when Senate Republicans tied its passage to a permanent estate tax cut for the wealthiest one percent of American families. Democrats refused to take the bait, and both measures failed.

The minimum wage hike would help about 13 million hard-working Americans -- not people on welfare, but people holding jobs, sometimes multiple jobs. The estate tax cut would make the heirs of a few million extremely rich people even richer. According to the most comprehensive research on income trends, by economists Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez, the incomes of the richest 300,000 Americans, adjusted for inflation, more than tripled between 1970 and 2000. Incomes of the bottom 270 million Americans -- 9 Americans in 10 -- were basically flat. The real incomes of the working poor fell.

From there it degenerates into a full-blown ant-rich screed. It reads like something better published at commondreams (and lo and behold, it is) or The Nation, not in a major metropolitan newspaper.

I won't even try to argue with Kuttner's specifics, because for me the issue is much simpler. An estate tax rate of 50%--which is where they'll head barring any Congressional action to the contrary--is not much more than Government and Media-sanctioned theft.

Rather than dazzle me with statistics, I'd have loved to see Kuttner explain why it's okay to have taxed income over a lifetime and then on top of that, tax the wealth it created a second time by half-again. Is there a defense of that?

The Democrats could have put their (our) money where their mouths were and actually passed the minimum wage increase that they so routinely cry out for this week but refused. Senator Frist's actions marrying the estate tax to the minimum wage increase was a crafty political move, no doubt.

Additionally, Senators Clinton and Kennedy clue us in on what else Democrats are willing to do via this op-ed published a week ago: Yet the White House and the GOP Congress have consistently opposed any effort to provide a fair increase in the minimum wage. It cannot be that in America our nation's leaders take care of themselves, but continually ignore the neediest Americans.

It will not be. That is why Democrats in Congress are taking a stand for minimum-wage families. We have vowed that Democrats will do whatever it takes to block a congressional pay increase until we have raised the minimum wage.

Democratic Senators vow to do a job then simply refuse to do it. Robert Kuttner calls it a sham but from where I sit it appears a significant and attractive compromise giving both parties in Congress something they want.