The Ponderosa: Huzzah!

Death before Dhimmitude

Energy Independence

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Huzzah!

Senate Defeats Minimum Wage Increase

The Senate defeated dueling proposals Monday to raise the $5.15-an-hour minimum wage — one backed by organized labor, the other salted with pro-business provisions —in a day of skirmishing that reflected Republican gains in last fall's elections.

Both plans fell well short of the 60 votes needed to advance, and signaled that prospects for raising the federal wage floor, unchanged since 1996, are remote during the current two-year Congress.

"I believe that anyone who works 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year should not live in poverty in the richest country in the world," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., arguing for the Democratic proposal to increase the minimum wage by $2.10 over the next 26 months.

...

-more-

The corpulent trust fund Senator fuming after being thwarted in another attempt to give away the money of the productive -- simply delicious!

Incompetent, teenaged fast food workers everywhere musta been crushed to hear this on "Yo MTV News" between semi-pornographic reality shows!

Flashback: My Uncle Walter on the Minimum Wage.

Flasback: My cousin Thomas on the "Living" Wage

The Ponderosa

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Huzzah!

Available from The Virginia City Trading Post . . .

Previous Posts