What are they thinking???

Pete Gonigam, publisher of FirstElectricNewspaper.com, reports that a bill to increase the Illinois state minimum wage to $10.00/hour has escaped an Illinois Senate committee. That's a 21% increase.

This would push Illinois' minimum wage, in stages, to the highest in the nation, surpassing Washington state's $9.04/hour.

Let's see; what part of the picture is that that people don't want to understand? Minimum wage goes up. Companies can't afford to stay in business, so they start laying off employees and/or going out of business. Then those employees don't even have jobs at all.

I remember making a sales call on a woman business owner in Colorado in then-Rep. Pat Schroeder's very Democratic district. Mandatory health insurance was the big scare for small business in 1988. She said that she thought all employees ought to have health insurance. No argument there.

Then we talked about her meager profits in her small company of 10 employees. Using her estimates of increased cost to provide health insurance, the numbers indicated that her small profit and her own income would evaporate if she had to provide health insurance for her employees.

Her answer to those numbers? "But people ought to have health insurance."

I couldn't get across to her that they first had to have jobs!

Read Pete's article by clicking right here.