Senate candidates tout economic party line
late 2012 budget that actually raised taxes on couples making $450,000 a year. The alternative would have been the “fiscal cliff,” a default financial plan that involved much sharper hikes.
Since then, Mr. Toomey has voted against other bipartisan budget proposals crafted to avert government shutdowns. But he did defy Republican orthodoxy this summer. Though long a champion of global trade deals, he opposed the the Trans Pacific Partnership, a pact involving a dozen countries bitterly denounced by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Ms. McGinty, who opposes TPP, called that “a ridiculous flip-flop.” (Then again, she espoused the NAFTA deal while working for President Bill Clinton. She has since said it didn’t live up to expectations.) But Mr. Toomey said TPP did not sufficiently protect American dairy farmers and pharmaceutical companies.
“I am generally biased in favor of trade,” he told the Pennsylvania Press Club Sept. 26. But “this deal had some flaws.”
That stance has irked some business leaders, said Gene Barr, who heads the Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce and Industry. But “I don’t agree with anybody 100 percent of the time, and there are legitimate concerns about the way some of these countries operate.” The chamber doesn’t endorse candidates, but Mr. Barr called Mr. Toomey “clearly the better choice.”
“When you get into government dictating things like the minimum wage — that will decimate jobs,” Mr. Barr said. He cited a 2014 Congressional Budget Office study that estimated hiking the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour could cost 500,000 jobs.
But the study also noted that “many more low-wage workers would see an increase in their earnings.” And liberal economists have backed the hike, arguing that employment trends are shaped less by wage hikes than broader economic trends.
“The economy is always going to have rules,” said Stephen Herzenberg, executive director of the union-backed Keystone Research Center. “The question is whether those rules allow a rising tide to lift all boats, or whether the benefits just go to the top.”
For the past 35 years, “Every [demographic] group has seen wage decline or stagnation,” said Mr. Herzenberg. “People want back an economy in which, when productivity grows, everybody gets a piece of it.”