could we use this to take back the House?

[littlewolf]

Found this column while reading on-line.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-obama-should-raise-the-minimum-wage/2013/12/06/0655626c-5ded-11e3-be07-006c776266ed_story.html?wprss=rss_eugene-robinson

Obama’s speech Wednesday about the need to redress growing inequality was sweeping and comprehensive — perhaps to a fault. In outlining solutions, he talked about the minimum wage. But he also mentioned immigration reform, rewriting the corporate tax code, eliminating the “sequester” budget cuts, holding down tuition costs for higher education, providing universal preschool, retraining the long-term unemployed, creating “promise zones” in poor communities . . . the list goes on
All are worthy goals, but what chance is there of getting such an ambitious agenda through Congress? The Republican majority in the House disagrees with Obama philosophically and opposes him reflexively; if he’s for it, they’re against it.

snip

We know from the debt-ceiling fight, however, that House Republicans can be induced to do the right thing — if the political cost of doing the wrong thing is unacceptably high. And this looks like an issue on which Obama and the Democrats should be able to get real traction.

snip

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is shamefully low compared with minimum-wage levels in other industrialized countries — nearly $13 in France, for example, and around $10 in Britain and Canada.
The highest minimum wage in a major country is Australia’s — in U.S. dollars, about $15 an hour at the current exchange rate. Conservatives would howl if anyone in Washington proposed such a thing. According to Republican dogma, such a high minimum wage would be the ultimate job-killer, a disastrous move that could only choke off the recovery and perhaps send the economy back into recession.

snip

Apparently, nobody told all this to the Australians. Unemployment there is 5.7 percent, versus 7 percent in the United States. The Australian economy escaped the Great Recession of 2007-08 and in fact hasn’t seen any kind of recession in 20 years. (Oh, and Australia has universal health care, too, but perhaps that’s another column.)

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