More than 60 years after the minimum wage was first adjusted to account for inflation, Pennsylvania’s Senate Republicans say they want more information before taking action in Pennsylvania.

It prompts the question: What are we going to learn in the next six months that we haven’t learned in the last 60 years?

The federal minimum wage, set at 25 cents an hour in 1938, has been adjusted 20 times since. Over its first seven years, the minimum wage jumped by a whopping 60 percent.
Today, opponents are predicting economic disaster over my proposal to adjust the rate by 40 percent after a ten-year wait. With straight faces, they say that a minimum wage increase would hurt low-wage workers.

Of course, if this were true, you might think that advocates for low-wage workers would have learned something over the past 60 years. And they have. They have learned that these gloom-and-doom stories are nonsense.

In addition to the 20 federal adjustments, 18 states, having lost their patience with Congress, raised their own minimum wages. If ever there were a chance for the doomsayers to make their case, this would be it. But it didn’t work out that way.
Serious comparisons of states that have varying minimum wages shows that job creation and small business growth is often better in higher minimum wage states. In 12 states plus the District of Columbia in which the local minimum wage was higher than the federal minimum, employment growth was 50 percent greater (6.2 percent vs. 4.1 percent) from January 1998 to January 2004. In the same period, retail employment grew by 6.1 percent in the higher wage states versus 1.9 percent in the other states, according to the non-partisan Fiscal Policy Institute. In higher minimum wage states, the number of small businesses (fewer than 50 workers) grew by 3.1 percent compared to 1.6 percent for the balance of states.

It is disappointing that some legislation can run through the Senate at warp speed, while a bill to help low income families - now losing a dollar a day to inflation - is sent to the tower to be tortured.

Under the Ridge administration, no such “study” was needed to pass $3 billion in business tax cuts. When CEO salaries reach record highs, there are no mass layoffs of CEOs predicted and no Republicans take to the floor of the Senate and wonder what the effect will be on prices.

I have been introducing bills to adjust the minimum wage for six years. The Senate has nothing to fear from this bill. Schedule a vote. Show some courage. Take a stand.