A Stitch in Haste

I have little to say about the economics of the increase in the minimum wage that was just stealthily passed by Congress and will be signed into law by the president. I have blogged against the minimum wage before. It is bad economics, a violation of substantive due process, and an exercise in both utilitarian cannibalism and the Broken Window Fallacy.

When it comes to the minimum wage, you either get it or you don't. You either passed freshman economics or you didn't. You either acknowledge the realities of unskilled labor markets or you pine for a delusional fantasy world where the laws of economics can be repealed by a legislature. You either evaluate policies based on their consequences (both intended and unintended), or you evaluate them on the warm fuzzy feelings they stir in your bowels.

That is all old news, and I will not revisit it.

Having said that:

The wage hike was largely ignored, however, during an acrimonious debate over an emergency spending bill for the Iraq war, to which it was attached. The tactic of attaching it to a must-pass bill deflected attention from an issue Democrats hammered at effectively during last year's election. But it ensured that the wage increase and $4.8 billion in corresponding business tax breaks would take effect despite objections from the White House and other Republicans who wanted a larger package of business incentives.

Pardon my uneducated, uninformed political naivete, but what does the minimum wage have to do with the Iraq War?

More to the point, how is it "enlightened statecraft" when politicians -- whether legislators or executives, whether in the majority or the minority -- agree to engage in this dodge-and-parry political maneuvering?

If the Iraq War is so important as an issue, and if the minimum wage is so important as an issue, then why not -- an admittedly brash idea -- vote on each issue separately? Doesn't holding one issue hostage to the other, or piggybacking one issue upon the other, belittle and demean both issues, which everyone seems to insist are so important?

If our politicians were leaders rather than rulers, abominations like this would not happen. Deliberative bodies (of which at least half of Congress is supposedly the "greatest") should actually deliberate, not expend their energy devising Rube Goldberg political contraptions. Identify an issue, debate it, vote on it, move along to the next issue.

Embrace or oppose the Iraq War; embrace or oppose the minimum wage. But either way, acknowledge that the issues each deserved their own vote. And acknowledge that we deserve legislators who accept and implement this basic principle of governance.

But acknowledge also that, since all politicians are, by definition, moral defectives, we don't get what we deserve.

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Finally, note also that the White House made no mention of the minimum wage in its press release on the passage of the Iraq War funding bill. Go figure.