It looks like GOP House leadership is preparing to cave to GOP moderates and Democrats on the issue of minimum wage. Erick Erickson at Red State reports that GOP leadership is set to schedule a vote on an increase in the minimum wage — a move any economist with his head screwed on straight will tell you leads to increased unemployment — without even brokering a deal on adding some good policy to the package.

Erick has a good idea:

The GOP should add strict border security to the minimum wage bill. After all, if the House increases the minimum wage, there is going to be an increased rate of illegal immigration to offset the higher wages employers must pay legal residents. The net result will be higher illegal immigration and increased unemployment of legal residents as employers replace them with illegal immigrants who are not documented.

UPDATE: Indications are that some sort of conservative policy will indeed be attached to this legislation to lessen the pain. Still, it’s too bad that this is being scheduled for a vote.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 1:34 pm and is filed under economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.