$8.50 an hour is a poverty wage

As far as the Republicans in the Louisiana House of Representatives are concerned, it's still probably too good for you.

To date, 29 states and Washington D.C. have minimum wages that are higher than the federal minimum wage. In Louisiana, 5.3 percent of workers earn the federal minimum wage or lower. Employees like restaurant waitstaff and agricultural employees are exempt from the wage laws. But Louisiana has a higher percentage of workers who earn minimum wages than any other state in the nation.

Jan Moller, executive director of the Louisiana Budget Project, said the hike would have given effected workers an additional $852 per year. He noted that one in three of those workers are single parents. About 119,000 children live in homes where their parents or guardians earn minimum wages.

But the Republican majority of the committee expressed concerns that business owners dealing with the increased costs would ultimately lay off staff or automate the entry level jobs creating even less opportunity.

Sen. Jack Donahue, R-Mandeville, said people who feel they're being underpaid have the freedom to seek out another job.

Sure. If you find that you are among the estimated 127,000 Louisianians held in destitution by a degradingly low wage floor, it's probably because you hate freedom or something.  There are worse quotes than Donahue's from today's debate. But the Republicans are either operating on a 5th grade understanding of economic policy or they're being insultingly disingenuous. Let's be nice and assume it's the latter. Either way, nothing they said is worth taking seriously enough to argue with.

In any case, they don't care. What they do care about is beating the Governor. And since raising the minimum wage (even this piddling, insignificant amount) was a key campaign promise of his, they're not going to help him accomplish even that.

Dumb fund

This is actually progress

The Senate passed two of those measures Friday, House Bills 449 and 501. Both would give tax breaks to Bell Helicopter in Lafayette and would create the SAVE fund.

First, though, state Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, asked her colleagues to strip the SAVE fund from Robideaux’s HB 449.

The SAVE fund “doesn’t do anything because it’s nonsense,” Peterson said. “This is one of the worst bills I’ve seen in my entire career.”

The Legislature is going into its final week and this "nonsense" fund has been reluctantly passed even though everybody hates it. The reason it is progress, though, is last week people were calling it "nonsense on a stick." Somwhere along the line, we managed to take the stick out of it. So congratulations on that.

Anyway, this was cute.

State Sen. Jack Donahue, R-Mandeville, is the reluctant sponsor of the measure as the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

“In my eight years here, I’ve had bills that were a lot more fun than this bill,” Donahue told senators, before saying he was pushing the measure to create the tax offsets Jindal needs to avoid vetoing the budget.

Senators rejected Peterson’s effort and approved the bill.

Laughter began to break out from individual senators throughout the chamber. It was prompted by an amendment to the SAVE fund by state Sen. Eric LaFleur, D-Ville Platte, that had just popped up on their computer screens.

LaFleur’s amendment proposed that it be renamed the DUMB fund.

“It describes the bill for what it is, dumb,” LaFleur told his colleagues, as they continued to laugh.” I’m just trying to be candid for the public.”

An angry Donahue strode the microphone at the front of the Senate chamber.

“I’m insulted by it,” Donahue said. “This makes a mockery of what we’re doing.”

 Do not make a mockery of the nonsense. You might hurt someone's feelings.