Obama said now to agree with boosting minimum wage to $10
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama supports an effort by congressional Democrats to raise the federal minimum wage to about $10 an hour, higher than the rate he called for earlier this year, according to a White House official.
Proposals from House and Senate Democrats would boost the rate to $10.10 over two years, up from the current $7.25 an hour and more than the $9 proposed by Obama in his February State of the Union speech. The president backs the increase as a way to help working families, according to the official, who described Obama’s support Thursday on condition of anonymity.
“The president has long supported raising the minimum wage so hardworking Americans can have a decent wage for a day’s work to support their families and make ends meet,” a White House official said.
The legislation proposed earlier this year is sponsored in the Senate by Tom Harkin of Iowa and in the House by George Miller of California, both Democrats. It would raise the minimum wage — in three steps of 95 cents each, taking place over two years — to $10.10, and then index it to inflation. The legislation probably will be coupled with an expensing provision for small businesses, traditionally the loudest opponents of increases to the minimum wage.
Under that provision, small businesses would be able to deduct the total cost
investments in equipment or expansions, up to a maximum of $500,000 in the first year. Including such a provision helped persuade the Senate to vote overwhelmingly in favor of the past two minimum-wage increases.
“The combination of an increase to $10.10 and some breaks for small business on expensing unite virtually the whole Democratic caucus, and we are prepared to move forward shortly,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.
While Democrats, who control the Senate, overwhelmingly favor the change, it stands little chance of passing in the Republican-led House, said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. That’s because House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, opposes such efforts, he said.
On March 15, the House voted 233-184 against a proposal to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 by 2015. The proposal came as an amendment to a job-training bill, and all 227 Republican members voted against the increase.
“It’s going to that same room, that little dark room, where Boehner puts all of the bipartisan measures out of the Senate,” Durbin told reporters Thursday after a meeting of Senate Democrats. In a politically divided Congress, the House and Senate have refused to take up certain bills approved in the other chamber.
Senate Democrats are packing the legislative calendar this month with bills that appeal to the party’s core supporters, which includes unions, proponents of boosting workers’ hourly pay.
The wage legislation and a bill passed Thursday by the Senate to bar employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation have strong support from the AFLCIO, the nation’s largest labor group and a top contributor to Democratic Senate campaigns.
Democrats are defending 21 Senate seats in 2014, compared with 14 for Republicans, who need at least six more seats to gain a majority in the chamber for the first time in eight years. Labor political action committees have given 87 percent of their $12.1 million in contributions for the 2014 elections to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group that tracks campaign giving.
Raising the minimum wage is “an important economic issue” that sends “a message to working families struggling paycheck to paycheck that we can help them,” said Durbin, the chamber’s No. 2 Democrat.
Washington state currently has the highest state minimum wage at $9.19 an hour, a level indexed to inflation. Some cities have higher wages, including San Francisco, where the wage minimum is $10.55. On Tuesday, New Jersey voters approved a constitutional amendment, by a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent, that will raise the minimum wage to $8.25 an hour Jan. 1, from $7.25. That measure includes annual increases based on inflation.
INFRASTRUCTURE PUSH
At the Port of New Orleans on Friday, Obama made his case that the U.S. can reverse the decay of the American Dream by embracing ideas with bipartisan support, like technology, roads and schools — and some without, like his health care law. The alternative, Obama said, is to fall further and further behind competitors like Europe and China.
“The first thing we should do is stop doing things that undermine our businesses and our economy,” Obama said. “It’s like the gears of our economy, every time they are just about to take off, somebody taps the brakes and says, ‘Not so fast.’”
Gumming up the gears most recently, Obama said, was a partial government shutdown last month that Obama said had without question hurt the nation’s jobs market. Still, as Obama was leaving Washington on Friday morning, the Labor Department reported that American employers added 204,000 workers to payrolls in October, more than economists projected.
“We should be building, not tearing things down,” Obama said, with the dim roar of machinery in the distance.
Obama wants Congress to include spending for roads, bridges, airports and ports during ongoing budget negotiations because “that create jobs, it puts people to work.” Such projects usually have bipartisan support, but talks have stumbled over how to pay for the cost.
Obama throughout his presidency has pressed for more infrastructure spending during numerous other visits to ports, hoping to expand trade in service of his elusive goal of doubling U.S. exports by 2015. He said exports can help drive future economic growth. In 2010, the president announced an initiative to double U.S. exports between 2009 to 2014, to $3.14 trillion. They totaled $2.2 trillion last year.
Obama tied all the topics to the United States’ global economic competitiveness, against a backdrop of the largof est port complex in the world.
The area, from Baton Rouge to the mouth of the Mississippi, handles most of the country’s grain exports and one-fifth of petrochemical exports. A bill to finance the dredging of the river, to prepare it for the supertankers that will arrive once the Panama Canal expansion is completed in 2015, has yet to make it through Congress.
“We are preparing for it now, and we have been for several years,” said Gary LaGrange, the port’s chief executive. “Of course, the key is additional financing and additional funds to complete the jobs.”
Obama referred briefly to the need for the dredging as part of an overall plea for more investment in infrastructure like ports and bridges.
“Nationally, were falling behind,” he said. “We’re relying on old stuff. I don’t think we should have this old stuff; we should have some new stuff that is going to help us grow and keep pace with global competition.”
He also prodded lawmakers to pass a farm bill and immigration legislation, two items on his agenda that he has said he wants finished by the end of the year.
His proposals have gained little traction in Congress, and the president offered no new suggestions Friday for breaking the impasse.
Obama also took a sly shot at Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who was in the audience, for being one of the governors who chose not to expand Medicaid coverage in their states.
“Even if you don’t support the overall plan, let’s at least go ahead and make sure that the folks who don’t have health insurance right now and can get it through an expanded Medicaid, let’s make sure we do that,” he said to a largely friendly crowd.
In a statement after the president’s speech, Jindal said, “We will not allow President Obama to bully Louisiana into accepting an expansion of Obamacare,” adding that the health-care law “needs be repealed.”