More Legislative Chicanery--Increasing Minimum Wage For Most Except Themselves. Where Are Our Leaders?

Progressive Hypocrisy In Microcosm: West Virginia Legislature Raises Minimum Wage; Exempts Its Staff

February 24, 2014 by Personal Liberty News Desk 

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West Virginia’s Democrat-majority House of Representatives approved a bill earlier this month to raise the State’s mandatory minimum wage to $8.75 per hour above the Federal minimum wage of $7.25.

Except for Legislative staffers.

The bill itself requires a denial of basic market forces, but in exempting staffers, handicapped employees, students, seniors and 16 other categories of workers, it also required the Legislators who approved it to acknowledge that mandatory spending doesn’t equate to a net benefit for all concerned.

“There are economic reasons for exempting these workers from a wage hike,” notedBreitbart’s Mike Flynn on Saturday. “That the Democrats would push these exemptions, though, is at least tacit acknowledgement that minimum wage increases have negative economic consequences. The Democrat legislators themselves recognize that they would have to reduce employment if they had to comply with the wage hike.”

The bill is now before the State Senate Finance Committee, where, if it emerges unscathed, it will likely face a sympathetic Democratic majority.

State Senator Daryl Crowes was among the handful of Republicans who voted against the House bill.

“I want to talk about opportunity, education, higher education, job training and job assistance, things that would empower workers to rise through the economy,” he told Martinsville, W.Va. newspaper The Journal. “But that’s a lot more difficult to do than passing a minimum wage bill.”

Especially when the public doesn’t know what’s in it. Reports about the bill’s staff exemptions only began to circulate across conservative media platforms this week.