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david shribman

A half century ago John F. Kennedy sowed an unsettling thought in the minds of American politicians: To govern is to choose. This winter Washington political figures are confronting a governing choice that is more complex than any of them contemplated when the issue first emerged.

On the surface the question seems deceptively simple: Should the American minimum wage, set at $7.25 in the first summer of the Obama administration, be increased in the sixth year of Barack Obama presidency to $10.10?

In fact, the very simplicity of the issue is deceptive – as have been most of the arguments surrounding the issue, spawned more by passion than by perspective, since the first minimum wage (a mere 25 cents an hour) was enacted in October 1938.

The battle lines are utterly predictable: Democrats, labour and liberal groups believe that workers are underpaid and that an increase in the minimum wage will raise living standards at the bottom of the work force, while Republican, commercial and conservative groups contend that an increase in the minimum will prompt businesses to lay off workers. Indeed, this is exactly the shape of the debate in Washington, one stirred to new life after Mr. Obama vowed in his State of the Union Address to raise the rate unilaterally for workers on federal projects.

Until last week.

Now there are surprising new suggestions that – worst-case scenario for the Republicans and the Democrats alike – both sides of this completely unsurprising debate are right.

The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan study agency in the legislative branch of the government, disclosed last week that the $10.10 wage for most non-governmental workers would cut the number of Americans in poverty, just as the Democrats argued. The CBO also disclosed that the new minimum wage would eliminate about a half-million jobs, just as the Republicans contended.

Now that both sides are right, what does this do to the debate? The short answer: Makes it more interesting. More complex. More vital.

Because now the American debate over the minimum wage has moved from whether it is a good idea to balancing the good and the bad and evaluating whether to move forward. And now the argument over the minimum wage – employees of some small newspapers, switchboard operators of small telephone companies, some seasonal or amusement-park employees, casual babysitters and some workers on small farms are exempted – has made four hard questions unavoidable.

Though the CBO calculated that an increase in the minimum wage would increase "overall real income" by $2-billion, these questions linger:

Is increased unemployment but decreased poverty truly good for the economy? Does the decrease in poverty produce sufficient fuel for long-range job growth to compensate for, or to overcome, the economic burden of more people out of work? Are a decrease in poverty, and the increased buying power and confidence that would produce, more of a social good than the social cost of fewer people possessing the sense of production and personal meaning that a job carries? Is the notion that an increased minimum wage would penalize 500,000 Americans (by putting them out of work) but reward 900,000 (by lifting them from poverty) a facile but false mathematical clarity?

These questions were always part of the calculus but now, with this CBO report, they are thrust to the forefront. The effect is not insignificant, for it is forcing economists and lawmakers to make moral choices that, in turn, make them uncomfortable. When the debate was merely over whether to move forward or not, the choice was so much easier because the costs were so much fuzzier. No longer.

None of this consideration of the social, moral or economic costs necessarily has much changed anyone's mind in the country or the capital. The Democrats say it's worth it, the Republicans say it's not, mostly because the Democrats and Republicans have always said those things. But now it's harder for each side to make its argument without considering the views – amplified, and now verified, by the CBO report – of the other side. The argument used to be grounded in psychology. Now it's grounded in mathematics.

But still, above all, morality – where the clarity is required most but where it is most elusive. To govern is to choose. This choice is harder than it was last month.

David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.

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