Bare Minimum: Mitt Romney abandons his other good idea.
I LONG AGO GAVE UP trying to figure out who the “real” Mitt Romney is, but among the various claimants to that title is a guy who would like to index the minimum wage to inflation. I like this Mitt, because raising the minimum wage would provide a useful jolt of stimulus right now to the faltering recovery, and indexing it to inflation would keep us from waiting too long before we raised it again.
“The minimum wage is important to our economy,” Romney’s campaign literature said in 2002 when he ran for Massachusetts governor, “and Mitt Romney supports minimum wage increases, at least in line with inflation” (italics mine). This past January, while campaigning in New Hampshire, Romney said, “My view has been to allow the minimum wage to rise with the [Consumer Price Index] or with another index, so that it adjusts automatically over time.” Although Romney no longer seemed to contemplate minimum-wage increases in excess of the inflation rate, he still backed automatic increases tied to inflation. For Romney to maintain—over ten years!—such consistency on a topic as controversial as the minimum wage was unusual, to say the least.
It couldn’t last, and it didn’t. Newt Gingrich, the Club For Growth, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page all hammered Romney for reiterating his former position, saying it would kill jobs. By March, Romney was telling CNBC’s Larry Kudlow that, when the Democratic Massachusetts legislature had tried to increase the state minimum wage, he’d vetoed it. (He didn’t mention that he’d tried to substitute a smaller increase or that his veto was subsequently overridden.) Romney also told Kudlow that “right now there’s probably not a need to raise the minimum wage.”