Paris Hilton and the Minimum Wage

Haven't posted in a while. Been busy, don't ask.

It was the Repugnican tactic of adding a tax break for Paris Hilton and her ilk to a bill to raise the minimum wage that shocked me back to the keyboard. If ever there was a more dastardly amendment to a good bill, I'll write about it tomorrow but for now, I'll settle for this one. Briefly, Repugnicans added an amendment to the bill to raise the minimum wage that will give Paris Hilton and 8,199 (approx) of her rich buddies an average of about 1.4 million each out of Federal tax receipts. That works out to about $11.5 billion. In exchange, the 6.6 million people in this country working forty hour weeks for $10,700 per year, the minimum wage, get $1,200 per year for a total of $7.9 billion. That's the rich guys by $3.6 billion.

They've avoided voting against giving themselves a raise for the past nine years for about $36,000 per year in raises. And they can't vote to give the working poor a raise without shifting to you and me the tax burden (what a burden!) of the rich?

Amazing how Republicans keep convincing perfectly sane Americans to vote against their own self-interest.