Saturday, February 19, 2005
 
Nothing from Nothing Leaves State Taxpayers Paying More

The Montana legislature has a really bad idea: setting a retail minimum wage at $22,000 a year. Friends, Montanans, and countrymen, that's a $10 an hour minimum wage. Rationalizing:
    Wal-Mart pays its workers such low wages that they qualify for state welfare benefits subsidized by Montana taxpayers, people told a Senate committee Tuesday.

    As an incentive for these "big box stores" to pay a living wage to their workers, Sen. Ken Toole's Senate Bill 272 would impose a gross proceeds tax on these companies. They would be exempt from the tax if they paid their employees an entry level wage of at least $22,000 a year, counting both pay and benefits and if less than half of their workers were part-time.
Because legislators would prefer that the workers receive only state welfare benefits, which is the choice that legislators are making.

The socialists chirp:
    "State taxpayers are subsidizing Wal-Mart's payroll," said Kim Abbott, lobbyist for Working for Equality and Economic Liberation, a low-income advocacy group. "It's ridiculous."
and:
    Gene Fenderson of the Montana Progressive Labor Caucus agreed, saying "The Wal-Marts, Targets, Home Depots are not paying their fair share of taxes for the amount of wealth they extract from our states and the services they demand."
Because business is the chupacabra of society, and the government and the 'progressives' who want to forcibly redistribute wealth according to their whims are doing good.

This bill, should it pass, would yet again prove that the government is a Keynesian flat tire, loudly slowing economic progress.

(Link seen on Rocket Jones.)


- posted by Brian J. @ 11:26 AM
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