So now it’s the minimum wage.
Within the last few weeks, Democratic leaders at both the federal and state levels have announced that raising the minimum wage will be their top priority for 2014. In New York, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is already doing his part.
Speaker Silver took up the cudgel last week by announcing that he intends to introduce legislation to accelerate raises in New York’s minimum wage — which just went up on New Year’s Day — to $9 an hour a year ahead of schedule. It also ties future raises to the rate of inflation.
That flies in the face of a compromise negotiated last year by Gov. Cuomo and legislative leaders. And it skirts the real issue here: The state’s economy is not creating enough good jobs.
Now, we could cite survey after survey of economists showing that most believe raising the minimum wage is not the best way to help the poor — and that it may even hurt them. We could point out, too, that there are better ways to help working families if that’s what we’re concerned about, particularly through the Earned Income Tax Credit that provides the poor more money without discouraging work or making them more expensive for employers to hire.
But we’ll skip that because this new push for higher minimum wages at both the state and federal levels has nothing to do with economics. It has to do with painting Republicans as uncaring. In that sense, it shares much with the so-called “War on Women” Democrats ginned up earlier to paint the GOP as hostile to women.
We recognize that Democrats — President Obama included — are desperate to shift the focus from ObamaCare in a year that may see them lose the US Senate.
But even we wonder at the cynicism of pols who are now pushing a higher minimum wage not because it will help the working poor but because they have calculated it may be the only way to save their own jobs.