My head is spinning

Over at The Corner the assembled id of American conservatism has been discussing something I'd been meaning to post about. Namely, that if Democrats are looking for a ballot issue to drive turnout for the next election cycle, they should strongly consider the minimum wage. What's most remarkable about the discussion, though, is that the folks at TheCorner are on the cusp of advocating legislation raising the minimum wage as a way to forestall future Democratic initiatives. Crazy!

I can't link to all of their posts (too, too many), but check this out:

Every time the minimum wage is on the ballot or part of a campaign, we lose. Further, while they are bad economics, relatively low minimum wages are not THAT bad. So conservatives need to push for simply getting this issue settled so it doesn't keep coming up. We should agree to a $7.50 minimum wage that automatically goes up with the CPI just like Social Security payments, or perhaps instead indexed to average wage growth. |source|

In case you didn't follow the link, that's from a reader email approvingly posted by Jonah Goldberg.

Here's what strikes me as so remarkable about that. Last winter, a coalition of progressive groups made an effort to get exactly such a proposal on to the Michigan ballot -- the key component was linking the wage to the CPI. What eventually happened was that the Republican controlled state legislature short circuited the petition drive by passing legislation to raise the wage (without, of course, committing to future raises).