I'd like to believe this will kill the minimum wage increase, and that this was the Republicans plan all along...

That's doesn't make sense, Matt.

Republicans were the ones who put the bill forward. The GOP has infamously refused to allow any bill introduced by a Democrat onto the house floor.

If you mean they "killed" their own bill, then I suppose you make some sense. But that's ridiculous - it's not about defeating minimum wage - it's about disfusing a campaign issue, and maybe, if they're lucky, eliminating the estate tax. And I think it's going to backfire.

Exactly. If the Democrats fight this bill, they're fighting the increase in min wage... I don't think Republicans want to raise the minimum wage.. but they can effectively kill the issue by bringing up their own version and letting it die in debate... if the Democrats block it... even better.

It's an underhanded campaign tactic. The truth is people want a minimum wage increase, and the Republican Congress won't allow it, not on their watch.

To call a minimum wage an economic issue is to dehumanize it, to declare that the economy is more important than the worker. Luckily for you and I, we don't earn less than $7.25 an hour. (I'm making an assumption about you of course, given you have enough time to run a portion of this blog.) So we can debate the merits of paying wages in theoretical job loss numbers. But the sad truth is there are people who can't make enough working 40 hours a week to raise a family properly.

In the long run increasing minimum wage is just keeping with inflation to keep people out of poverty.