First damaging vote of two new congressmen - it's not their money so what?

[CNHT]

NH Representatives Join House Colleagues To Pass Federal Minimum Wage Increase
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: NH Representatives Join House Colleagues To Pass Federal Minimum Wage Increase

Governor, Senate President and Speaker Have Pledged Support to Increase NH Minimum Wage

Washington, DC - Today, New Hampshire Representatives Paul Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter, along with other Democrats in Congress, did what Republicans refused to do for 10 years and voted to give workers an increase in the federal minimum wage, raising it from $5.15 to $7.25. Nearly 13 million workers will benefit
from an increase in the minimum wage and 89 percent of Americans support its increase, including 72 percent of Republicans EPI, Newsweek poll, 11/11/06.

Here in New Hampshire nearly 19,000 would benefit from a minimum wage increase
EPI, CBPP, 8/2/06.

New Hampshire Republicans have long blocked efforts to increase the state's minimum wage, but Governor John Lynch, Senate President Sylvia Larsen and Speaker Terie Norelli have all pledged to make increasing New Hampshire's minimum wage a priority in the first legislative session of 2006.

"Raising the minimum wage is not just sound policy, it's a sign of our values," said Kathy Sullivan, Chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party. "Everyday New Hampshire families work hard and play by the rules to earn a good living, but they are still living in poverty. Paul Hodes, Carol Shea-Porter and other
Democrats in Congress are acting swiftly to fulfill our promise to restore America to a country that works for everyone. Passing minimum wage is a critical first step in that goal. We hope President Bush supports this legislation that will provide millions of Americans the long-awaited increase in wages they deserve."

In addition to increasing the minimum wage, the new Democratic Congress has wasted no time getting to work on the people's business, already passing historic ethics reform and the bi-partisan 9-11 Commission's recommendations.
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So, you'd better keep this contact info handy, because you are going to need it to keep hounding, and birddogging these two jokers.


Congressman Paul Hodes
http://hodes.house.gov/
Washington, DC Office
506 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5206

District Office:
114 North Main Street
Second Floor
Concord, NH 03301
(603) 223-9814

Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter
http://shea-porter.house.gov
Washington, DC Office
1508 Longworth HOB
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5456

District Offices:
33 Lowell Street
Manchester, NH 03101
(603) 641-9536
(603) 641-9561 fax

104 Washington Street
Dover, NH 03820
(603) 743-4813
(603) 743-5956

[error]

Causing higher prices, inflation, unemployment, poverty, and welfare dependence are sound policy and a sign of our values?

These people must be smoking something illegal.

[toowm]

And Bush is going to sign it.

Bi-partisanship = Thuggery from both sides

[Tyler Stearns]

A couple years ago I had a job as a dock attendant at a small pond.  The job required absolutely no skill, and thus I was paid only $6.50 an hour.  With this increase and the same one that is coming at the state level my employer would have to pay 75 cents more per hour.  That's over 11% increase in pay and that person didn't increase in experience or skill!  There is no way I deserved that kind of pay.

That's just one argument.  About 1,000 more where that came from.

[Rocketman]

A couple years ago I had a job as a dock attendant at a small pond.  The job required absolutely no skill, and thus I was paid only $6.50 an hour.  With this increase and the same one that is coming at the state level my employer would have to pay 75 cents more per hour.  That's over 11% increase in pay and that person didn't increase in experience or skill!  There is no way I deserved that kind of pay.

That's just one argument.  About 1,000 more where that came from.

Lemme try: "Jobs which are not worth minimum wage to the employer must, because of simple economics, cease to exist.  If we increase the minimum wage, small businesses which were once economically viable will instantly see their bottom lines move from the black into the red.  An increase in the "mandatory minimum" wage will lead directly to an increase in unemployment and cripple New Hampshire's small businesses."

[FrankChodorov]

besides...via Ricardo's law of rent we know that any increase in these wages will quickly get transformed into higher land values and thus higher lease payments for tenants.

in other words - once again a minimum wage increase is supported by big business because it raises the barrier for entry for their competition and by landowners because it will increase their land values...

[Rocketman]

besides...via Ricardo's law of rent we know that any increase in these wages will quickly get transformed into higher land values and thus higher lease payments for tenants.

in other words - once again a minimum wage increase is supported by big business because it raises the barrier for entry for their competition and by landowners because it will increase their land values...

So (reading past the lingo) you guys agree with the Austrians on something?

[FrankChodorov]

besides...via Ricardo's law of rent we know that any increase in these wages will quickly get transformed into higher land values and thus higher lease payments for tenants.

in other words - once again a minimum wage increase is supported by big business because it raises the barrier for entry for their competition and by landowners because it will increase their land values...

So (reading past the lingo) you guys agree with the Austrians on something?

yes - Rothbard in particular...who said that all of the state intervention was inplace before FDR's New Deal and to think that big business is against regulations is not supported by the historical facts.

this mirrored the same arguments by the new left marxist historians William Appleman Williams, James Weinstein, and Gabriel Kolko as cited by the contemporary mutualist Kevin Carson...

http://www.mutualist.org/id81.html

excerpt:
Economists of the Austrian school, especially Rothbard and his followers on the Rothbardian left, have taken a view of state capitalism in many respects resembling that of the New Left. That is, both groups portray it as a movement of large-scale, organized capital to obtain its profits through state intervention into the economy, although the regulations entailed in this project are usually sold to the public as "progressive" restraints on big business. This parallelism between the analyses of the New Left and the libertarian Right was capitalized upon by Rothbard in his own overtures to the Left. In such projects as his journal Left and Right, and in the anthology A New History of Leviathan (co-edited with New Leftist Ronald Radosh), he sought an alliance of the libertarian Left and Right against the corporate state.

Rothbard treated the "war collectivism" of World War I as a prototype for twentieth century state capitalism. He described it as

a new order marked by strong government, and extensive and pervasive government intervention and planning, for the purpose of providing a network of subsidies and monopolistic privileges to business, and especially to large business, interests. In particular, the economy could be cartelized under the aegis of government, with prices raised and production fixed and restricted, in the classic pattern of monopoly; and military and other government contracts could be channeled into the hands of favored corporate producers. Labor, which had been becoming increasingly rambunctious, could be tamed and bridled into the service of this new, state monopoly-capitalist order, through the device of promoting a suitably cooperative trade unionism, and by bringing the willing union leaders into the planning system as junior partners.6

This view of state capitalism, shared by New Leftists and Rothbardians alike, flies in the face of the dominant American ideological framework. Before we can analyze the monopoly capitalism of the twentieth century, we must rid ourselves of this pernicious conventional wisdom, common to mainstream left and right. Both mainline "conservatives" and "liberals" share the same mirror-imaged view of the world (but with "good guys" and "bad guys" reversed), in which the growth of the welfare and regulatory state reflected a desire to restrain the power of big business. According to this commonly accepted version of history, the Progressive and New Deal programs were forced on corporate interests from outside, and against their will. In this picture of the world, big government is a populist "countervailing power" against the "economic royalists." This picture of the world is shared by Randroids and Chicago boys on the right, who fulminate against "looting" by "anti-capitalist" collectivists; and by NPR liberals who confuse the New Deal with the Second Advent. It is the official ideology of the publick skool establishment, whose history texts recount heroic legends of "trust buster" TR combating the "malefactors of great wealth," and Upton Sinclair's crusade against the meat packers. It is expressed in almost identical terms in right-wing home school texts bemoaning the defeat of business at the hands of the collectivist state, or describing the New Deal as an example of the masses voting themselves largesse from the public treasury.

The conventional understanding of government regulation was succinctly stated by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the foremost spokesman for corporate liberalism: "Liberalism in America has ordinarily been the movement on the part of the other sections of society to restrain the power of the business community."7 Mainstream liberals and conservatives may disagree on who the "bad guy" is in this scenario, but they are largely in agreement on the anti-business motivation. For example, Theodore Levitt of the Harvard Business Review lamented in 1968: "Business has not really won or had its way in connection with even a single piece of proposed regulatory or social legislation in the last three-quarters of a century."8

The problem with these conventional assessments is that they are an almost exact reverse of the truth. The New Left has produced massive amounts of evidence to the contrary, virtually demolishing the official version of American history. (The problem, as in most cases of "paradigm shift," is that the consensus reality doesn't know it's dead yet). Scholars like James Weinstein, Gabriel Kolko and William Appleman Williams, in their historical analyses of "corporate liberalism," have demonstrated that the main forces behind both Progressive and New Deal "reforms" were powerful corporate interests. The following is intended only as a brief survey of the development of the corporate liberal regime, and an introduction to the New Left (and Austrian) analysis of it.

[CNHT]

And Bush is going to sign it.

Bi-partisanship = Thuggery from both sides

Bush is no conservative -- he's a new world order liberal. And everything he's done has shown this to be true.