Congressional Silly Season

We are getting down to the end of the congressional session before our politicians take the month of August off for a well-needed vacation---with the French and Germans. Democrats are in full throat calling for a raise in the minimum wage and liberal Republicans don't want to be in an election race where they can be accused of not giving a man his full due for a day's work, so they want to at least be able to say they support a "living wage", also. In order to do this, the leaders of the Republican majority have devised a bill which would raise the minimum wage to $7.25 over 3 years, but it is combined with a decrease in the estate taxes which the democrats can't stand since this is a "tax break for the rich". Of course, there is no way you are going to take more from a rich man's estate than he wants to relinquish. A wealthy man can always find a way to protect his accumulated assets from being confiscated by the government. By the same token, you are never going to force an intelligent business man to pay more in wages than his circumstances will allow. Liberals seem incapable of understanding that if someone is being paid $6.00/hour in an environment like ours when there is essentially full employment, that is all that job or person is worth and all anyone will pay. Tell a businessman to pay more and a job is lost. The democrats in the senate now say they will kill the house-passed measure and not permit an increase in the minimum wage to prevent the estate tax from being lowered. This will leave the senate democrats in the position of denying a benefit to millions (in their rhetoric) in order to extract more in tax from almost nobody. The status quo is probably as good an outcome as we can expect. On to the beach.