ALWAYS on the lookout for ways to put more money into the pockets of the wealthy, House Republicans have linked $123 billion in tax breaks that mostly benefit the rich to a much-needed $1 an hour minimum wage increase. Republicans, who have consistently resisted raising the current $5.15 minimum wage, are trying to use a bill to help the nation's lowest paid employees as a Trojan horse with which to sneak through parts of the failed $792 billion tax cut they proposed last year. President Bill Clinton has promised to veto the minimum wage bill unless Congress removes the tax breaks.

The Republicans claim the tax cuts in the bill that passed last week in the House are designed to help small businesses that would be saddled with the two-year boost in pay for their lowest-paid employees. In fact, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, more than $7.8 billion of the $12.8 billion in tax cuts annually would come from reductions in estate and gift taxes, which primarily aid rich individuals, not small businesses. Less than 10 percent of small businesses are left to individuals as part of an estate or are given as a gift.

The wealthiest 5 percent of Americans would get 88 percent of the bill's tax benefits, according to Citizens for Tax Justice and the Economic Policy Institute, two Washington, D.C., research organizations. The biggest winners would be the top 1 percent of all taxpayers, those earning on average about $915,000, who would get nearly 75 percent of the tax reductions. That means people earning more than $319,000 a year would get an average annual tax cut of $6,128, while middle- and lower-income workers, those earning less than $65,000 a year, would save an average of only $6 in taxes a year.

The Republicans have managed to turn the minimum wage bill on its head. A bill supposedly designed to aid low-wage workers would actually give its biggest benefits to the highest-income people in the country. The money for those tax breaks would come from a federal budget surplus that could be used for housing, education, health care and crime prevention.

But, with the future of Social Security uncertain, the nation's elderly in desperate need of a prescription drug plan, public education floundering and affordable health care out of reach for millions of Americans, House Republicans have voted to give some millionaire an extra $7,000 instead of investing in America.

Some suggest that the House Republicans' bill has been a sham from the beginning, that Republicans hope to use it as an election-year chip with which to claim that they were the party that passed a minimum wage package only to have Mr. Clinton veto it. That would be a cynical ploy.

If Republicans want to give the rich a tax cut, detach it from the minimum wage bill and let it fly on its own merits. Holding hostage the ability of the poor to feed and clothe their families to help the rich get richer is wrong.

© 2000 St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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