Federal minimum wage hike

Minimum Wage Hike And A Tight Economy
Minimum wage workers are set to get a pay bump later this week: Thursday, the federal minimum wage will go from $5.85 to $6.55.

"The minimum wage in 1968, if you adjust it for inflation, was $9.88. "

A classical economics analysis of supply and demand implies that by mandating a price floor above the equilibrium wage, minimum wage laws should cause unemployment.

some key facts about these states show that a number of factors unrelated to minimum wage increases are actually responsible for high unemployment rates:...
Employment and the Minimum Wage

Salaries of Members of Congress: A List of
Payable Rates and Effective Dates, 1789-2008 (pdf)
...1978, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1986, 1988, and 1989).
The Ethics Reform Act of 1989 changed the method by which the annual adjustment is determined for Members and other senior officials, based on a formula using changes in private sector wages and salaries as measured by the Employment Cost Index. Under this revised method, annual adjustments were accepted 12 times (those scheduled forJanuary 1991, 1992, 1993, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2008)and denied six times those scheduled for January 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, and 2007)
The annual adjustment automatically goes into effect unless:
(1) Congress statutorily prohibits the adjustment;
(2) Congress statutorily revises the adjustment; or
(3) the annual base pay3 adjustment of GS employees is established at a rate less than the scheduled increase for Members, in which case Members would be paid the lower rate

Projected January 2009 Member Pay Increase of 2.8%
Under the formula established in the Ethics Reform Act, Members may receive a pay adjustment in January 2009 of 2.8%.5 This adjustment — if not revised by Congress oradjustment procedure, Members originally were scheduled to receive a 2.7% increase in January 2008, based upon the formula set forth in the Ethics Reform Act of 1989.6 This increase would have raised their salaries to $169,700. The scheduled Member increase was revised to 2.5%, resulting in a salary in 2008 of $169,300, due to factors related to the increase in the base pay of General Schedule (GS) employees.

...Secretary of Defense Robert Gates launched a fierce verbal assault on… go ahead, take a guess: the "creeping militarization" of U.S. foreign policy. It seems that too many unappetizing "peacekeeping" tasks, once handled by other departments of the government, are now in the military's lap, which turns out not to be quite as capacious as once imagined. "The Foreign Service is not the Foreign Legion, and the U.S. military should never be mistaken for a Peace Corps with guns" were among his exact words. ...


The Three Trillion Dollar War

Have you Had Enough?