The Democrats' minimum wage problem

Moe Lane:

Shocking. Why have they hidden their light under a bushel for all these years?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday delayed action on legislation raising the minimum wage, the centerpiece of the Democrats’ 2014 agenda. 

[snip] 

Reid has not yet unified his caucus on the issue, which is a constant in the Democrats’ election-year playbook. Of the 55 senators who caucus with the Democrats, only 32 have signed on as official co-sponsors of Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D-Iowa) bill.

(H/T: Hot Air) The ostensible problem was a CBO (a org that the Left can never decide is good or bad these days) report promising that this measure would lose half a million jobs. But the real problem is that Democratic politicians have never been able to gently explain to their more activist members that business owners do not have Scrooge McDuck swimming pools full of gold coins. I know that this sounds unbelievable, but trust me: many progressives really do think that prices are high simply because capitalists take ‘too much’ profits. That a business like, say, oil production could be seeing most of its revenues go out in overhead (ESPECIALLY taxes) seems to be absolutely alien to them, as a whole.
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Perhaps rational thought is not dead on the Democrat side of aisle after all.  They are also hearing from the usually reliable academic left that the raising of the minimum wage will push some institutions into having to gut programs or go into bankruptcy.  It would also deny students the opportunity to gain experience while paying for a portion of their education.  And, there is the historical record of unemployment caused by raising the rate.