The GOP Split On The Minimum Wage

Commenting on Romney’s and Santorum’s recent endorsements of a higher minimum wage, Douthat wishes moderate Republicans would fight for more economically sound conservative ways to help low-wage workers:

In fairness to the pro-minimum wage Republicans, there are various nuances here — indexing the wage to inflation, as Rick Santorum has proposed, is better than just having periodic, politically-motivated hikes, and the state-based minimum wage increases favored by some Republican politicians would have fewer perverse effects than a federal increase. And of course the minimum wage is a winning issue in the polls, and you can’t win every policy battle …

… but the case for tactical surrender would be a lot stronger if more Republican politicians, and Republican moderates especially, would first actually try to make the argument for an alternative, right-of-center suite of policies on jobs and wages. That could mean payroll tax cuts, it could mean an expanded Earned Income Tax credit or (as Marco Rubio has proposed) a wage subsidy as a replacement for the EITC, it could mean some of the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Strain’s proposals to help the unemployed … there’s a whole range of potential policies, and policy combinations, that might deliver some of the minimum wage increase’s benefits with fewer downside risks.

Reihan is on the same page but sees why it won’t happen:

The irony is that the conservatives who might be amenable to something like Strain’s approach — let’s not risk excluding workers from the formal labor market by raising the statutory minimum wage, but let’s spend intelligently to get people back to work — are the ones who are embracing a minimum wage increase as (essentially) a proxy for some better mix of policies, or as a way of signaling that they care about the well-being of American workers and that they’re willing to use the power of government to improve their well-being. And most of the conservatives opposed to a minimum wage increase are also disinclined toward active labor market policies of the kind Strain has in mind, including an expansion of federal wage subsidies, on the grounds that such policies represent big government overreach, or that they involve spending money we don’t have. It’s no wonder that low- and middle-income voters are skeptical as to whether conservatives are doing enough to defend their interests.