The media is very fond of talking about a character it calls “Joe Sixpack.” Joe is completely ignorant of all policy detail (”Joe Sixpack doesn’t do nuance”, a pundit might say) but he knows what he likes — God, guns, tax cuts — and what he doesn’t — gays, Muslims, compound sentences, anything French. Joe is a bit of a pardox: on the one hand he is intensely Puritanical, on the other, his last name is Sixpack, so he must enjoy drinking. Joe is a big fan of the so-called War on Terrorc: “Joe may be able to find Iraq on a map, but he knows he don’t like A-rab terrorists” is a line that has probably appeared (mutatis mutandis) in both Time and Newsweek. Note that the mere thought of Joe can cause a reporter to lapse into a weak imitation of Huck Finn.

And the media, as well as a political operative I spoke with earlier today, would have us believe that Joe Sixpack is happy to be making an extra 2 bucks an hour in minimum wage, even if for every extra dollar he makes, Paris Hilton is making an extra 20 million.

Joe’s a colorful character, a man for all seasons, ready to apply his homespun wisdom to defend tax cuts for the rich, unnecessary wars, the abridgement of the right to privacy and so on and so on. There’s only one problem with Joe: he doesn’t exist. Journalists have created him so that they have a strawman — an imaginary one — whose ignorance exceeds even their own.

Why bother to explain the complexities of Iraq when Joe Sixpack won’t understand? And the difference betwen tax cuts for Ken Lay and tax cuts for working Americans? It’s lost on Joe, so why should a reporter have to spend a few hours “deep in the weeds” (as they like to say) of some new tax bill that gives millions more dollars to the super-wealthy.

The bill that passed the House earlier today raised the minimum wage by two dollars and ten cents, a little bit over 40 percent. Let’s see how much the average, say, inheritor of a state valued at $50 million had their “hourly wage” go up by today:

Under current law, the estate tax is phased out completely by 2010, but jumps back to 55 percent on estates larger than $1 million in 2011.The bill passed Saturday would exempt $5 million of an individual’s estate, and $10 million of a couple’s, from estate taxes by 2015.

Estates worth up to $25 million would be taxed at capital gains rates, currently 15 percent and scheduled to rise to 20 percent. Tax rates on the remainder of larger estates would fall to 30 percent by 2015.

That means that if you had a $50 million dollar estate, under the old law, you pay about $27 million in taxes, while under the new one you would pay about $12.3 million. So the amount of taxes you’re paying is less than half what it would have been without this Paris Hilton tax reduction bill.

How about this instead? We peg the minimum wage to the inheritance tax: for every million dollars a $50 million dollar estate gets in tax reduction, the minimum wage does up by one dollar. That seems fair, doesn’t it? Using that formula, the minimum wage would be going up 14 dollars and seventy cents an hour, to about 20 bucks an hour. A lot, but certainly not that much relative to the savings of the super wealthy under the inheritance tax reduction measure.

There’s a simpler way for Congress to deal with both the inheritance tax and minimun wage: tie both to the Consumer Price Index. If the CPI does up 2%, the minimum wage goes up 2% and the amount of one’s estate that is exempt from taxes goes up 2%.

Of course, the whole idea of tying the minimum wage to the tax rate on estates of the super wealthy is monstrous (though tying both to the CPI makes a lof of sense). But if they’re going to do it, do it right.