Shameless Greed

The House of Representatives was busy yesterday engaging in vicious class warfare against working families.

Their two signature accomplishments were: 1) striking the proposed increase in the minimum wage from the Labor-HHS bill, and 2) reviving the effort to repeal the estate tax.

Late last week, members of the House Appropriations Committee voted to include an amendment to raise the minimum wage to $7.25 on a funding bill. Given that Congress is a few months away from surpassing the Reagan-years record for ignoring the minimum wage, and the fact that its buying power is the lowest it’s been since 1955, it’s time for a raise.

Yet, instead of letting the measure go to the floor of the full House for a vote, the Republican leadership decided to pull the appropriations bill from consideration and the minimum wage increase along with it.

At the same time, conservatives began crafting a compromise measure to revive the estate tax repeal, which died in the Senate last week. As the New York Times reports this morning, “Though billed as a compromise, the measure would cost about three-quarters as much as full repeal of the estate tax.” Estimated cost over 10 years: $280 billion.

It’s hard to find words to express the outrage of these actions. It’s not simply that the policy process has gotten off track. It’s that a key purpose of government has been turned upside down, and done so with apparent impunity.

Instead of seeking ways to address and ameliorate the unbalanced growth which characterizes this economy, they’re exacerbating the problem. Instead of a small, overdue boost to low-wage workers that would help them reconnect, just a bit, to the growing economy, they want to shovel even more of the benefits of our prodigious productivity growth to the top of the wealth scale.

There’s a word for this: shameless. And shame on all of us if we sit back and watch it happen.

Editor's Note: Jared Bernstein is a senior economist and Ross Eisenbrey is the Vice President and Policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank devoted to promoting discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future