Angry Right’s Secret Revulsion: Why They Really Dodge Minimum Wage Questions

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/angry-rights-secret-revulsion-why-they-really-dodge-minimum-wage-questions

It’s no great secret that Republicans oppose increasing the minimum wage. They don’t pretend it’s something they want to do under any circumstances. They don’t even really bother disguising their opposition. They cloak their view in dated and oversimplified economic arguments about labor demand and economic growth when the real impediment is ideological, and so it’s a somewhat better kept secret that many Republicans oppose the minimum wage altogether.

Opposing the minimum wage isn’t a politically seemly thing to do, though, and thus the great political consequence of President Obama’s decision, announced during his State of the Union address, to institute a $10.10 minimum wage for future federal contracts, will be to draw the extent of this opposition out into the open.

If there’s one thing conservatives agree upon with respect to Obama’s executive order, it’s that it won’t impact very many people. They’re actually probably correct about that. Yet despite the policy’s marginal impact, some conservatives abruptly turned discovering the means of denying a higher wage to a tiny number of workers into a top priority.

In the days since Obama’s State of the Union address, they’ve attacked the order itself, encouraged Congress to block it, and scoured federal law for a reason that the courts should throw it out.

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