This is really bad
Another day, another assault by House Republicans on average Americans.
In one of the more cynical moves in modern political history, House Republicans last night coupled an increase in the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour with permanent elimination of the estate tax, or nearly so, on the wealthiest American families. That bill, if it makes it through the Senate, would cost the nation $268 billion over the first 10 years. Think of it as a payoff to Westmoreland County billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who played a major role in funding the rise of the crazy right (see my blog post of two days ago on Scaife). It is a tax break the super-rich don't need and the country can't afford.
But wait--it gets worse. In a separate bill, the House last night approved a pension reform act that would, among other things, give companies legal immunity from employee lawsuits when they try to force through pension changes that would harm some current employees but improve the company's bottom line. This may be an attempt to limit the impact of a 2003 court ruling in the Cooper vs. IBM case, which held that IBM's conversion of its pension plan in the late 1990s to a so-called "cash balance" pension plan constituted illegal age discrimination.
Both bills face a rocky road in the Senate, where various Republican chairman are said to be furious with the House over one thing or another. Apparently a whole bunch of business tax and regulatory breaks that were intended by Senate Republicans to get Democratic votes for the pension bill were stripped out and put in the awful minimum wage bill.
Ultimately, there is really only one cure for all this: return Congress to the control of the Democrats in November and elect a Democratic president in 2008.