Richard Nixon should not be your role model

So why is Obama's economic policy increasingly resembling Nixon? First price controls

And now wage controls?

Of the two, the idea of boosting wages is by the most damaging. Regulating insurance price increases is merely bad for people trying to purchase or use that insurance (ie, it will make that insurance less useful, just as government mandated types of insurance has made it more expensive). This is certainly counterproductive and damaging to the health care economics situation, which is unpleasant already itself. But insurance costs are but one factor among many which contribute to the problem there.

It does not potentially harm employment levels at at time where we have already high unemployment. Wages, or more precisely, labour costs, are basically one of the most significant contributors to employment levels, at least in the short run. Technology and its associated productivity increases therein could potentially reduce employment in particular industries, such as we have seen in manufacturing. The idea of boosting wages goes back to the Hoover administration, and was comfortably adopted and expanded by FDR. It was, among many other policies at the time, one of the most harmful and idiotic ideas we've ever had. Having a job which paid "too little" money was not the problem that the Depression posed us, just as it is not the problem now. The problem is the many people who could not get those jobs because of a structural problem of too little aggregate demand pushing a downward signal on wages while wages remain sticky and thus too high. Raising the marginal cost of jobs will make it HARDER to get them, at a time when many people are already out of work. I therefore second the idea that Summers and Romer should resign in protest over this.

This is before even considering the long-term implications over whether the government should use (inflated) wage policies to encourage middle class growth. We should not, France is an excellent example of how this works out. Poorly.