The sands in the hourglass of the legislative session are slipping away from the Democrats who are used to controlling everything in Olympia, and with every passing day comes the realization that their goal of rewarding their SEIU 777NW union donors with a minimum wage hike is also slipping away.
Ultra-liberal House Speaker Frank Chopp tried to bury that reality on a Friday afternoon, hoping it would get lost over the weekend, as he finally admitted what has long been evident – he doesn’t even have enough Democrat votes to pass the job-killing $12 per hour minimum wage hike proposed by Jay Inslee. That’s right – even Democrats in the House realize that jacking up the nation’s highest minimum wage by almost one-third is bad for the Washington State economy, even if former econ major Jay Inslee does not.
However, Chopp did hold out hope in his press conference for getting major contributions from his usual benefactor SEIU 775NW, by resorting to the line that Inslee likes to use when he knows his random thought is an ultra-partisan non-starter: it’s “important to start the conversation.”
Of course, the Washington Post had also weighed in on this “conversation” that Democrats are trying to start across the country to distract voters from the sagging economy under the Obama administration:
“The great virtue of the Congressional Budget Office’s recent report on the minimum wage is that it injects a much-needed dose of reality into the debate over job creation. The Obama administration and its congressional allies have taken the position that raising the minimum wage almost 40 percent would have little, if any, adverse effect on jobs. The CBO rejects this view as unlikely…To be sure, weak labor markets still reflect the Great Recession’s hangover. But the administration isn’t helping. It needs a new spirit: Make jobs, not propaganda.”
