From Our Paycheck To Their Pocket

The national minimum wage legislation passed by the House and now under consideration by the Senate is, as far as I’m concerned, another reason why only a fool would trust the Repugs with their money (unless we’re talking about the investor class, of course).

So, if I am to understand this scam of a bill currently being debated in the Senate, a service worker in Nevada, California or Washington state could earn their previously lower wage with tips on top of that wage, but now, they would receive a wage adjusted to include tips that would equal the higher wage.

I’ll try to decipher this as follows:

Old wage: $5.15 per hour
Tips: $3 per hour (approx.)
Total: $8.15 per hour

New wage: $4.25 (adjusted to accommodate new minimum wage total)
Tips: $3 per hour (approx.)
Total: $7.25

And this is a good thing? To quote a service industry spokesman (from the CNN article)...

“No provision results in the lowering of wages for any worker. The purpose of the provision is to allow employers with tipped employees to count their employees' tips as wages for purposes of meeting their minimum wage obligation," Brendan Flanagan, a spokesman for the National Restaurant Association, said in a statement Tuesday after Democrats began raising concerns.

This excerpt from the story that I used for my little math exercise above explains why that first sentence from Flanagan is a lie.

Except for in the seven states at issue, employers of tipped employees now pay only a portion of the minimum wage -- starting at $2.13 an hour -- as long as the employees draw enough tips to make up the rest. A tipped employee is defined as one who regularly receives more than $30 per month in tips.

And try to imagine the standard of living, by the way, for someone who earns an hourly rate of $2.13 an hour and earns about $30 a month in tips.

Under the GOP-written legislation, according to Democrats, that same system would go into effect in the seven states where employers now pay the full wage. So instead of getting to keep tips on top of their minimum wage in California, Nevada and the other states, tipped workers would be paid a base wage of $2.13 an hour and employers could use their tips to make up the rest.

So basically, this is legislation aimed at actually discouraging other states below the federal standard from raising the wage because otherwise the workers would be penalized by having to now include tips as part of the $7.25 per hour.

And of course, the other piece of this bogus bill is – yep, you guessed it – a planned further cut in the estate tax (Bradley Whitford, by the way, was so right about the GOP and tax cuts) though Dr. Bill “Cat Killer” Frist has already excluded the possibility of a estate tax cut from pension overhaul legislation (to wit: if you had a defined benefit pension plan, kiss it goodbye – it will be up to you to select your own asset allocation, transfer your funds into a cash balance or defined contribution plan and lose any earnings you may have accumulated) so Frist would REALLY have to tap dance if he planned to keep the estate tax provision in minimum wage legislation, and the fact that Harry Reid, among others, has come out so strongly against this Repug sham legislation (why wouldn’t he?) is a good sign also.

Another part of this story that interested me was this quote from Zach Wamp, this conservative Repug senator from Tennessee (all redundant, I realize) that can be found from this link to a New York Times story (hope it doesn’t go “behind the wall” soon)...

Representative Zach Wamp, Republican of Tennessee, said Democrats were upset with the legislation because Republicans had found a clever way to link the two. “You have seen us outfox you on this issue tonight,” Mr. Wamp told Democrats in the floor debate.

(Why did I know that those fine folks at ThinkProgress were all over this, by the way?)

Aw, gee gosh, Zach, ah got so plum een-spired bah youl lil’ taunt thar that ah got all interested-like in yol’ lil’ ol’ story an’ found this link.

And from the Wikipedia story...

During his 1994 election campaign, Wamp admitted that he had had a problem with cocaine but asserted that he had stopped using it years ago. After abusing alcohol and cocaine for several years in college and while holding a photography job based in Chattanooga, he checked himself into a drug rehabilitation clinic in 1984. In the clinic, he pledged to his family to turn his life around. As part of his experience at the clinic, he is now devoutly religious Southern Baptist. In the Congress, he has fought to make it easier for drug addicts enter drug rehabilitation as well as other measures to help addicts seek help.

I give Wamp credit for overcoming his dependencies and helping others, but it seems like all of the Repugs who manage to kick substance abuse to some degree end up using that as an excuse to try and shove their version of morality down everyone else’s throats. By such strict (some would say obnoxious) adherence to their own beliefs and attempts to marginalize those of others in the process, it can be argued that these people ended up trading in one addiction for another.

And this is the second time that Zach has uttered something recently that was straight out of the Foghorn Leghorn school of political elocution, by the way, and here was the first (from this prior post):

``We should not and cannot rewrite history to ignore our spiritual heritage," said Representative Zach Wamp, a Tennessee Republican. ``It surrounds us. It cries out for our country to honor God."

Let’s “honor God” by taunting the political opposition party, right Zach?

And by the way, Wamp is running for re-election, and to learn more about Wamp’s worthy opposition (in what would probably be a hell of an uphill fight, I realize, given Wamp’s constituents), you can read more from this Swing State Project link.

On another note, I know posting activity continues to be sporadic. I hope to be back on track by no later than early next week.