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By JOHN SLOAN
Rappahannock Newt Contributing Writer * The crusade to raise the minimum wage ^egan as a noble quest. Its goal: to help the working poor, those struggling to support a family on a wage that hadn’t increased in eight yeara.
Recent facts have shown this apparently bei)evolent effort to be — in reality — a political ploy to buy union votes in an election year, l As a result of game playing, the Democratic leadership in Congress entangled itself in a net of its own making. Determined to prove that business estimates of job losses from an increase was exaggerated, the leadership asked its highly respected budget office to study the cost of a wage hike.
The Congressional Budget Office report turned out to be a mine field. CBO’s experts found that a wage hike to $4.65 per hour would cost the country 250,000 to 500,000 jobs.
Further, the jobs would be lost in the South and Southwest, areas already struggling with high unemployment. Realizing that these Southern votes already were “soft,” the Democratic leadership ordered CBO to release a “revised” version. Since then, CBO has since been playing the three Japanese monkeys: It neither hears, sees nor speaks evil of its congressional bosses.
The legislators who commissioned the study could have saved taxpayer dollars and CBO time by gleaning the same facts from reports written
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