The last time there was a minimum wage increase on the ballot in Montana ('94? '95?), 75% of the voters favored it three weeks from the election. Two weeks from the election, the restaurant industry began a relatively minor TV ad campaign and the initiative failed on election day.

Advaoctes, beware complacency!

I'll second Jim's statements. Those of us in favor of this will have to be very vocal as the election nears. We'll be putting more money into the hands of our poorest citizens - money that they can't help but spend in state (at grocers, clothing stores, and yes, restaurants).

If you're talking to a republican, remind them about how wonderful Bush's tax cuts were (for the richest 5%) and say that this does the same thing by putting money in people's pockets (only this time of those who deserve and need it most).

Justin, if only raising the minimum wage accomplished what you hoped it would. See: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa106.html

"If a business cannot simply pass along its new labor costs, it must somehow absorb them--by eliminating workers rendered unproductive by the new minimum wage, by replacing labor with more-productive machines, or by cutting back production. Those jobs not eliminated will be more demanding, as employers will use fewer people to produce the same amount of work.

Teenagers suffer most from the adjustments required by an increase in the minimum-wage rate. These workers are generally the least experienced, least skilled, and least productive. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the present unemployment rate for all teenagers actively seeking jobs is 16.5 percent, and the unemployment rate for black teenagers is 36.9 percent, more than double the overall average.[5] The existing minimum wage has contributed significantly to producing these abhorrent levels of unemployment.

The damage done to teenagers is twofold. First, they lose income immediately. Second, because minimum-wage legislation has rendered them unemployable, teenagers cannot gain the ex- perience and skills that would make them employable at higher wages later. If there were no floor price on labor, teenagers could offer to work for a lower price until they had gained the training, experience, and skills they needed to command a higher wage."

Here's a story, from the Helena Independent Record, about the Progessive Clergy Alliance's support for an increase in Montana's minimum wage: http://www.helenair.com/articles/2006/07/14/helena_top/000rally.txt

Don't believe what you read from the Cato Institute. If you want to be informed about who benefits from an increase in the minimum wage and the truth about how an increase in the minimum wage impacts the economy, see: http://www.letjusticeroll.org/pdfs/AJustMinimumWage.pdf

The Cato Institute is against the Government period... a radical right wing think thank sponsored by huge corporate interests. Cato's Corporate sponsors include:
Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Bell Atlantic Network Services, BellSouth Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation, GTE Corporation, Microsoft Corp- oration, Netscape Communications Corporation, NYNEX Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Viacom International, American Express, Chase Manhattan Bank, Chemical Bank, Citicorp/Citibank, Commonwealth Fund, Prudential Securities and Salomon Brothers. Energy conglomerates include: Chevron Companies, Exxon Company, Shell Oil Company and Tenneco Gas, as well as the American Petroleum Institute, Amoco Foundation and Atlantic Richfield Foundation. Cato's pharmaceutical donors include Eli Lilly & Company, Merck & Company and Pfizer, Inc.

Robyn, I noticed that you skipped by the arguments and went straight to the "radical right wing" name calling as if that is suffient.

When a business cuts from 10 to 9 employess through further mechanization or process revamp, who loses?

When a business doesn't hire the teenager looking for "the first job" who loses?

If business aren't constrained from laying off employees, or resisting minority or unskilled new employees, or people choose to skip fast food trips because of price increases how does the minimum wage advance anything for those that need it most?

Here's a non-Cato source that gets to the same point.
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1749

>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Minimum Wage—Maximum Nonsense
June 21, 2006
Benjamin Powell
Daily News (Los Angeles)

Minimum wage laws hurt the low-skilled workers they are intended to help. Raising the minimum wage hurts these workers even more. No matter how many ways economists say it, politicians, even those supposedly sympathetic to free markets, are content to peddle this harmful policy again and again. California’s Democrat-dominated Assembly and Senate and its Republican Governor Schwarzenegger are the latest culprits pandering this economic nonsense...
Some workers, particularly teenagers in part-time jobs, have very low productivity that makes it unprofitable to pay them more than $6.75 an hour. For these workers the politicians’ proposed 15 percent increase in the minimum wage will mean unemployment. In 2004 the Employment Policy Institute studied the impact of raising California’s minimum wage by $1. They found that approximately 18,600 Californians would lose their jobs and in the process would miss out on $220 million in total income...
One need not look only to economists known for supporting free markets to find opponents of the minimum wage. Paul Samuelson, a strongly left-leaning Nobel Prize winning economist from MIT, wrote in 1970, “What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?”

Youths, minority youths in particular, are hardest hit by minimum wage laws because often they have not yet built up the skills to be profitably employed at higher wages...
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Robyn, one more thought. If you are the Robyn Morrision of the Progressive Clergy Alliance it would be nice to know what you are really advocating so that the voters know what's at stake. The PCA, affiliated with Let Justice Roll, seeks to raise the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. Montana small business would see an increase from $5.15 to $7.25, a 41% increase when that happens. When the teenagers that can't find jobs turn to drugs will the PCA pay for their rehab?

Craig, where's the empirical evidence for rampant teenage job loss and ensuing? In fact, the raise would merely restore they buying power of minimum wage workers (80% of which are adults, not teenagers)* to what it was in the 1950s. I'm personally too young to recall how awful the unemployment and drug use rates were in the 1950s, any ideas?

Some restaurants will have to pass on the costs to customers, and I don't oppose loopholes for small businesses (as there are already in MT state law)**. However, the bulk of minimum wage workers serve larger businesses where CEOs wages have gone through the roof. In fact, in talking with some of my friends who work and have worked in restaurants, I have found that all who worked for mom and pop establishments made over the minimum wage already. It seems that the 'poor restaurants' ploy is but a red herring (unless you're poor restaurants are corporate giants like McDonalds and Outback Steakhouses).

* http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/issueguides_minwage_minwagefacts

and

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0625-09.htm

** http://www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/america.htm#Montana

Justin, did you notice the state and federal task forces to deal with Montana's growing meth problem? People that don't care about passing an employment drug test seem to be rising and becoming a serious problem for Montana.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/viewpoints/articles/0625siebel0625.html

>>>>>>>>>Montana shows how to divert kids from meth

By Thomas Siebel
Special for The Republic
Jun. 25, 2006 12:00 AM

WOLF CREEK, Mont. - Meth is wreaking havoc in Montana.

It is destroying the lives of our young people. It is tearing at the fabric of our communities.

It is straining the limits of the law enforcement, prison and foster care systems. The prisons are literally overflowing with meth users. The social costs are staggering. The human costs are incalculable...
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Justin,
FYI, the top 1% of wage earners pay 32.27% of the taxes and the top 50% of wage earners pay 96.54%. So quit bashing the rich! They are funding the government for the bottom 50%!

In addition, Bush's tax cuts are fueling the economic boom we are in now despite a war and the high oil prices. Tax cuts fuel economic growth by allowing that extra money to be invested in capital, expansion, etc. rather then the black hole of government waste.

And, honestly, what kind of productive employee are you if you have to rely on the government to enact a minimum wage increase in order to get a raise? If you don't have the work ethic to earn a raise on your own, you deserve to make $5.15 an hour.

Craig, METH is a big problem NOW, yes. This, as many parents work two, sometimes three jobs to "put food on your family" to quote the president. Minimum wage jobs have never been easy on young families, but at least back in the '50s parents could scrape by and spend a fair amount of time with their children. Today, as their earning power has fallen precipitously, that is no longer possible, hence the rise not only in poverty (obviously) but in adolescent crime and drug problems.

Guarantee working families a LIVING wage and let parents spend more time with their families, instead of working tirelessly just to keep clothes on their backs and food on their table. That is how we'll bring down crime and drug use and re-sew the fabric of our society, not with ever-heavier handed (Gulags, martial law) and ever more expensive law enforcement, which only steps in when in most cases it is much much too late.

And Andy, I suppose in some world we wouldn't need to form a government to protect our wages, enforce laws, cultivate parks, etc - everyone would just 'earn' whatever they needed (wanted?) in life. But I consider myself lucky enough to live in a Democracy where our government has long enacted protective (and life enhancing, like parks) measures for its citizens - often to the dismay of the wealthy or the few who already have far more than they need in life.

Oh, and as for Bush's avoidance of the "black hole of government waste," let's not forget that he has steered the American people into our largest budget deficit (say it with me now, and slowly) EVER. Even many (most?) conservatives who see themselves as fiscally responsible have started to chide Bush for his terrible fiscal policies.

oops - that last statement was supposed to be a question. My impression has been that a rising tide of republicans are opposing Bush's fiscal policies, but I'm not sure.

And I wanted to add, concerning the minimum wage:

The government that enacted the minimum wage in the first place did it as a statement of dignity, not only for workers, but for our nation, that we could and would ensure that anyone who put in a full days work in our country could make an honest living. It's only been very recently I suppose that people no longer identify themselves with their government and with their fellow Americans, seeming to lose touch with the fact that we're all in this together.

Justin, you wrote, "It's only been very recently I suppose that people no longer identify themselves with their government and with their fellow Americans, seeming to lose touch with the fact that we're all in this together."

What? The very beginnings or our country were about people who pulled away from their governments and struck out on their own.

You also wrote, "Guarantee working families a LIVING wage and let parents spend more time with their families, instead of working tirelessly just to keep clothes on their backs and food on their table."

That notion of paying people not what they are worth, but what they need (equalizing outcome, not equalizing opportunity) is not our tradition and leads to much economic dislocation. Guaranteeing a wage does not guarantee a job or a business that provides such a job. All across small town Montana there are shuttered businesses and the jobs they use to provide. Drive through Valier, Cut Bank, Shelby, Malta, and Chinook and consider what was. We use to have "service" at gas stations. A couple of guys would wash your window, check your radiator, oil, and other fluid levels, and the air in your tires all the while your car was being gassed up. We use to have carhops at fast food drive-ins. All those jobs are gone. Half of a loaf is better than no bread in the breadbox.

Since you are going down the eugenics path you might as well read about it. http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/Womenswork.pdf

>>>Reformers endorsed different wage theories in this era of eclectic
political economy. But most American progressives belonged to an
intellectual tradition that preferred to see wages determined by
workers’ needs rather than by their productivity. On the progressive
account, consumption needs, not the value of output, rightly determined
a worker’s wages.
The progressive view of wage determination, with its emphasis on
consumption, drew upon the labor-union theory of the 1880s.21 Frank
Foster of the American Federation of Labor, for example, argued that
“it is not commonly the value of what is produced which chiefly determines
the wage rate, but the nature and degree of the wants of the
workers, as embodied in their customary mode of living” (Mussey
1927: 236). Likewise did the influential and pioneering labor reformer
Carroll Wright, one of the first Americans to call for a legal minimum
wage, assert that “[t]he labor question” is a matter of the “wants of
the wage-laborer” (1882: 4–5).<<<

Craig,

Lots of people went down the eugenics path including Rockerfeller and lots of prominent Republican families.

Many that oppose an increase in the minimum wage also oppose having a minimum wage period. Do you?

If we had never achieved a minimum wage life would be much less afforable /miminumally acceptable and livable for many workers.

Adjustments to the minimum wage from time to time to keep up with the cost of living is an acceptable, necessary step.

Eric, I'm for limiting barriers that prevent people of minimal skill level from having a chance to become productive and begin the climb up the ladder of success.

See: http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060728/OPINION04/60727041