ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, April 12, 1996 TAG: 9604120051
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
NO QUESTION, the minimum-wage debate in Congress has as much to do with election-year politics as with the merits of the issue. By provoking Republican opposition to a higher minimum, President Clinton and congressional Democrats hope it will prove a "wedge" issue - reminding economically anxious blue-collar voters how far to the right the GOP has shifted.
Indeed, after Senate Republicans rejected a vote on raising the minimum wage, Democrats this week were pointedly comparing the 38 percent inflation-adjusted increase in Sen. Bob Dole's salary over the past 25 years with the 23 percent decline in the minimum wage's buying power.
But just because the minimum wage is political doesn't mean it shouldn't be raised. A strong case can be made for a modest increase - by 90 cents over two years to $5.15 an hour, as President Clinton has proposed.
After all, the purchasing power of the minimum wage has fallen to a 40-year low. The proposed higher minimum, adjusted for inflation, would remain well below its average value during the 1970s. In real terms, it would be only 10 cents above the level that Dole, George Bush and Newt Gingrich supported in 1989 - the last time it was increased.
Republicans in Congress have rightly promoted the value of work in our society and the need to move welfare recipients off the dole and into jobs. Which surely is all the more reason for assuring that jobs offer a route out of poverty for wage-earners and their families.
No question, the minimum wage in itself isn't the most precise of anti-poverty weapons. A lot of workers earning the minimum are teen-agers, some from middle-class families, who take entry-level jobs during summers or while attending school. The earned-income tax credit for working-poor families, which President Clinton expanded in 1993, is in some ways a better anti-poverty tool.
But just because the tax credit has merit doesn't mean the minimum wage has none. While a number of minimum-wage workers are students, not all are. In fact, two-thirds of the nation's 10 million minimum-wage earners are 20 years or older. Four in 10 are their families' sole breadwinners. A majority are women, many of them single mothers holding down jobs such as ringing up cash registers or tending to kids in day care or to the elderly in nursing homes.
As the gap between haves and have-nots grows wider in our still-affluent society, surely the hard-working poor deserve a living wage. Surely the rest of us have an interest in assuring they get it.
No question, raising the minimum wage is not without costs. Some low-paid workers would lose jobs. Some jobs would go unfilled.
But just because there's a downside doesn't mean the upside wouldn't be greater. Economic studies suggest the employment impact would be small. Particularly in today's economy, when joblessness is relatively low, lost employment would probably be quickly recouped. Meantime, raising the minimum wage would help ratchet up incomes where the need is greatest and the disparities are largest.
Since 1938, congressional Republicans have mostly grumbled and delayed but gone along with hikes in the minimum wage. Until now. Today, the alternative to simply restoring some of its buying power is in effect to abolish the minimum wage, by rendering it irrelevant.
That's what some GOP congressmen seem to want without explicitly saying so. Why shouldn't this be a political issue?
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