No Minimum Wage Raise!

Small business and franchise owners breath a sigh of relief tonight. In a divisive election year, the Republican controlled Senate smothered an unsuccessful attempt to raise the nation's minimum wage of $5.15 per hour. It rejected claims by leading Democrats that after a decade the minimum wage needed to be adjusted to a higher cost of living.

The Associated Press reports Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, one of the backers of the failed wage increase, as saying:

"'Americans believe that no one who works hard for a living should have to live in poverty. A job should lift you out of poverty, not keep you in it,' A worker paid $5.15 an hour would earn $10,700 a year, "almost $6,000 below the poverty line for a family of three."' 

But a Republican senator had a very different observation: 

"For every increase you make in the minimum wage, you will cost some of them their jobs," said Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga.

He described the clash as a "classic debate between two very different philosophies. One philosophy that believes in the marketplace, the competitive system ... and entrepreneurship. And secondly is the argument that says the government knows better and that topdown mandates work."