Pelosi Backs Bill That Would Raise Minimum Wage To $10 An Hour

By Travis Waldron/Think Progress

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday called on Republican House leadership to take up legislation recently introduced by Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) that would raise the federal minimum wage above $10 an hour. Miller and Harkin announced the bill, which would set the minimum wage at $10.10 per hour and index it to inflation so it raised automatically thereafter, this week.

Pelosi cited recent stock gains that pushed markets to record highs even as worker incomes remain stagnant as her reason for backing the legislation, The Hill reports:

“This week, we saw something quite remarkable, the stock market soaring to record heights. At the same time, we see productivity keeping pace,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. “But we don’t see income for America’s middle class rising. In fact, it’s been about the same as since the end of the Clinton years.” [...]

“If we are going to honor our commitment to the middle class,” she said, “we have to reflect that intention in our public policy.”

Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would bring it in line with its historical borrowing power, which peaked in 1968, and indexing it to inflation would prevent Congress from having to repeatedly raise it to keep up with rising costs. The current wage would be $10.40 had it been indexed to inflation in 1968.

Top Republicans have already signaled their opposition to any increase in the minimum wage, even though 65 Republicans currently serving in Congress voted for the last increase, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007.

Democratic House Candidates Now Have A Nearly 1.2 Million Vote Lead Over The Republicans

By Ian Millhiser/Think Progress

The day after the election last month, ThinkProgress took a preliminary tally of the total number of votes cast for candidates for the House of Representatives. We found that, despite the fact that Republicans won a commanding majority of the seats, theAmerican people cast more than half-a-million votes for Democrats. This number was based on early tallies, however, and it was especially likely to undercount many West Coast states that had less time to count ballots.

More than a month after the election, the Democrats’ popular vote lead expanded significantly. Based on current tallies,Democrats now lead Republicans 59,343,447 to 58,178,393 in total votes cast for their House candidates — meaning that the American people preferred Democrats over Republicans by nearly a full percentage point of the total vote. Yet, despite clearly losing the popular vote, Republicans will control nearly 54 percent of the seats in the House in the 113th Congress.

This disparity between the will of the American people and the actual outcome of the election did not happen by accident — it is largely the product of massive gerrymandering by Republican state officials. President Obama won Pennsylvania by more than 5 points, but Democrats carried only 5 of the state’s 18 congressional seats. Obama won Virginia, and Democrats took 3 of 11 House seats. Obama won Ohio, but Democrats carried only 4 of 16 seats in Ohio’s House delegation. In state after state after state, Republicans used their unconstitutional ability to gerrymander Democratic votes into meaninglessness — and they were able to do so because the conservatives on the Supreme Court refuse to do anything about it.

In just a few weeks, a misguided package of spending cuts and middle class tax hikes threatens to drag America back into recession. Just over a month after that, America risks defaulting on its debt — potentially plunging us into depression. And even if these immediate threats are averted, it could come at a very high price. In an attempt to strike a deal with recalcitrant Republicans, President Obama recently offered to take future Social Security benefits away from seniors. Meanwhile, Speaker Boehner can’t even manage the right flank of his caucus enough to hold a purely cosmetic vote intended to counter the — now entirely justified — view that Republicans care primarily about protecting millionaires from paying taxes. Because of the Republican Party’s apparently inability to negotiate in good faith in order to avert catastrophe, America now faces the very real possibility of an economic collapse once the debt ceiling comes due early next year.

All of these risks would evaporate completely if the divided 113th Congress bore any resemblance to the unified government the American people voted for.

Top Three Myths Conservatives Use To Oppose Increasing The Minimum Wage

By Pat Garofalo/Think Progress

House Democrats have introduced a bill in the House — bound to go nowhere due to the Republican majority — that would increase the minimum wage to $10. This would give the wage the purchasing power that it had in the 1960s.

Republicans have publicly met the idea of raising the minimum wage with contempt, with Rep. Bill Young (R-FL) even nonsensically telling one constituent who asked about the Democrats’ bill to “get a job.” Meanwhile, thousands of working Americans this week rallied in favor a higher minimum wage.

Conservative opposition to a higher minimum wage hinges on a few tired arguments that ultimately protect big businesses and hurt low-income workers. Here are the favorite conservative myths when it comes to the minimum wage and why there’s really nothing to them:

1) The minimum wage kills jobs. “It’s a classic election-year ploy to make the Democrats look like they’re protecting low-income workers. I think it’s well understood that raising the minimum wage hurts workers on the lower end of the pay scale in that it does kill jobs,” said a recent statement from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. However, several academic studies have shown that raising the minimum wage does not have a negative effect on employment. In fact, an analysis of state minimum wage increases showed that those state boosting their wage “had job growth slightly above the national average.”

2) Increasing the minimum wage hurts small businesses. Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) reacted to a proposal to raise the minimum wage by saying that small business owners are “going to have to lay people off.” However, two-thirds of low-wage workers actually work for big corporations, most of which have largely recovered from the recession and could therefore afford to increase wages. The three largest employers of low-wage workers have all seen large profit increases in the last few years.

3) Increasing the minimum wage only benefits teenagers. Many Republicansargue that raising the minimum wage just hurts teenagers’ ability to gain work experience. But as a new report from the Economic Policy Institute shows,nearly 90 percent of minimum wage workers are 20 years old or older. Plus, “more than a third (35.8 percent) [of minimum wage workers] are married, and over a quarter (28.0 percent) are parents.”