On the minimum wage, JEB! makes Mitt Romney look like a bleeding-heart liberal

You can bet the Crown Prince never met a big tax cut for financial speculators and coupon clippers, a trade deal favorable to outsourcers and Chinese job creators, or a federal subsidy for oil companies that he did not like, but when it comes to American working people's incomes, well...

(Salon) - Mitt Romney may be seared in the collective memory as the epitome of a callous plutocrat — a man who proclaimed that corporations are people, admitted that he was “not concerned about the very poor,” and derided the “47 percent” of Americans “who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” But when it comes to the federal minimum wage, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee looks like a downright bleeding heart compared with Jeb Bush, one of the party’s top presidential prospects for 2016.

Speaking before an audience in South Carolina on Monday, Bush stated that he opposes a federal minimum wage, arguing that the issue is best left to the states or the whims of the private sector and suggesting that calls for a federal increase amount to nothing more than “a great soundbite.”

“We need to leave it to the private sector. I think state minimum wages are fine. The federal government shouldn’t be doing this,” Bush said. “This is one of those poll-driven deals. It polls well, I’m sure – I haven’t looked at the polling, but I’m sure on the surface without any conversation, without any digging into it people say, ‘Yeah, everybody’s wages should be up.’”

That stance aligns Bush — the putative moderate in the GOP field — with some of the Republican Party’s most conservative elements. Romney, by contrast, articulated a sharply different view. Read more.