New Republic, Osita Nwanevu
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/osita-nwanevu>/February 27, 2021
The Democrats Are Blocking a $15 Minimum Wage
Not Republicans. Not the Senate parliamentarian. Joe Manchin,
Kyrsten Sinema, and even Joe Biden are to blame for squandering
their party’s majority power.
JIM WATSON/POOL/GETTY IMAGES
According to the Center for Economic Policy and Research, the national
minimum wage in this countryrose
<https://cepr.net/this-is-what-minimum-wage-would-be-if-it-kept-pace-with-productivity>in
tandem with both inflation and productivity gains in the workforce until
around 1968. If this had continued, the federal minimum today would be
over $24. Instead, it is $7.25, the wage set by the last increase 12
years ago. On Wednesday, Senate Minority Whip John Thune, a
Republican,objected
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/opinion/john-thune-minimum-wage.html>to
another increaseon the grounds
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/opinion/john-thune-minimum-wage.html>that
he’d made a mere $6 an hour as a cook in South Dakota in the 1970s. It
was quickly noted on social media that this would amount to more than
$20 an hour today given inflation—or over 175 percent more than the
current federal minimum wage. The provision in the coronavirus relief
package he was objecting to, which the House of Representativespassed
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/us/politics/minimum-wage-stimulus-democrats.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage>early
Saturday, would gradually raise the federal minimum to just $15 an
hour—not next year, or the year after that, or the year after that, but
by 2025.
A Reuters/Ipsospoll
<https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/poverty/540599-most-americans-back-raising-federal-minimum-wage-to-15-poll>released
Thursday found that 59 percent of Americans support the proposal. In
November, voters in Florida, who rejected Joe Biden, approved increasing
their state’s minimum wage to $15 bymore than 20 points
<https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/11/3/21546906/live-results-florida-minimum-wage-amendment-2>.
This was no surprise: Every state wage increase referendum since 1996has
passed <https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44706.pdf>. And the consensus
within the electorate has been joined, in recent years, by an increasing
consensus among economists that graduated wage increases have negligible
impacts on employment. For a 2019 paper published in/The Quarterly
Journal of Economics,/UMass-Amherst’s Arindrajit Dube and his colleagues
examined 138 state minimum wage increases from 1979 to 2019 and found,
as he explained this week in/The Washington Post,/that “the number of
low wage jobs barely budged.” “The finding held, as well, even when the
minimum wage was set at a fairly high rate compared with the state’s
median wage (the highest being around 60 percent of the median wage),”
hewrote
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/24/minimum-wage-economic-research-job-loss/>.
“We found no effect on employment at levels significantly above the
minimum wage.”
$15 an hour is not a living wage, nor is it a sweeping solution to
inequality in this country.
While the demand for a $15 minimum wage has become a central plank in
the progressive agenda over the last decade, it’s worth being clear
about the scale of change it would actually bring about. The Economic
Policy Instituteestimates
<https://www.epi.org/publication/a-15-minimum-wage-would-have-significant-and-direct-effects-on-the-federal-budget/>that
raising the wage would benefit 32 million workers. Hundreds of thousands
would be lifted out of poverty. But $15 an hour is not a living wage,
nor is it a sweeping solution to inequality in this country. It would
not fundamentally restructure our economy in any way. Raising the
minimum wage is best understood as the ground floor of welfare policy.
In fact, it’s the basement—a high aspiration for those whose
expectations are subterranean. And this week, our lawmakers couldn’t
manage it.
That’s not to say a $15 minimum wage is dead—it isn’t, technically. A
regular bill on the proposal can be introduced at any time. But the
gambit of bundling an increase with the Covid-19 reconciliation package
has failed. It has beenwritten and said
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/us/politics/federal-minimum-wage.html>that
the gambit failed because the Senate parliamentarian ruled that
including the minimum wage increase would violate reconciliation rules.
This is false: The Senate parliamentarian is a wholly powerless
functionary who can be overruled at any time by the party holding the
White House and Congress—both of which, as you might recall, are now
controlled by the Democratic Party. The gambit failed because the White
House and many Democrats in Congress opposed overruling the parliamentarian.
Progressives on and off the Hill have proposed alternatives that might
satisfy the parliamentarian. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, for instance,
wants a 5 percent total payroll penalty on large corporations that pay
workers less than a desired wage, and a tax credit equivalent to 25
percent of wages—for up to $10,000 a year—for small businesses that pay
their workers well. But most minimum wage workers aren’t employed by
large corporations—in Oregon,only 20 percent
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/02/26/wyden-sanders-minimum-wage-tax-penalties/>of
minimum wage workers are in firms with over 500 employees—and the
measure would lack the force and simplicity of a federal minimum. Policy
minds who’ve examined what Wyden has slapped together, including Dube,
have been puzzling over whether and how exactly it might work.
But the reality is that Senate Democrats don’t have 50 votes for broadly
and significantly raising the minimum wage, either directly or through
some hastily jury-rigged tax scheme. Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and West
Virginia’s Joe Manchin would have killed the increase even if the
parliamentarian had approved it and would have killed it even if Kamala
Harris had been willing to override the parliamentarian to include it in
the reconciliation package. If the $15 wage is resurrected in a regular
bill, their opposition to eliminating the legislative filibuster will
kill it before the two of them have a chance to kill the proposal on
substance in an up or down vote. Some have argued all this absolves the
Democratic Party as a whole of responsibility for the proposal’s fate.
But as long as Sinema and Manchin remain in opposition to it, it will be
plainly and literally true that a $15 minimum wage increase is being
blocked by Democrats.
What’s Joe Biden’s role in all this? Well, he’s the president of the
United States. And one of the perks of being the president of the United
States is the platform the position offers him for communicating with
voters—most of whom support raising the minimum wage, and some of whom
live in Arizona and West Virginia.
One thing Biden might have said to voters is that the minimum wage and
other policies are more important than the Senate’s rules.
One thing Biden might have said to voters, in any of the domestic policy
speeches and public statements he’s made over the past month, is that
the minimum wage and other policies are more important than the Senate’s
rules and that the Senate’s rules should be changed to pass them,
potentially giving Manchin and Sinema, who do not really care about
raising the minimum wage but do care about being reelected, an incentive
to support raising the minimum wage and changing the Senate’s rules. Not
because voters would have been persuaded by Biden to support a policy
they didn’t already support—a president’s power to actually change the
public’s mind on something islimited
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/s0022381611000600?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents>—but
because the salience of an already popular policy and the obstacles to
it would have been deepened. Biden did not do this, primarily because
he, like Manchin and Sinema, does not believe that the U.S. Senate
should be an institution where Democrats can easily pass a policy agenda
supported by the majority of the American people. This is a bad position.
It has been argued that even if Joe Biden were to adopt the alternative
position that the Democratic Party should be able to pass a policy
agenda—and even if he argued the same to voters—he might nevertheless
fail in getting Manchin and Sinema to agree with him. This is correct.
It is, though, incumbent upon Biden to try to persuade members of
Congress. This opinion has evidently been the subject of some
controversy on social media in recent days. “The Green Lantern Theory of
domestic politics—if Dems just had the will they could make it happen—is
such incredible nonsense,” the author James Surowieckitweeted
<https://twitter.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1364205145064697858>on
Tuesday. “What ‘pressure’ can Biden apply from the bully pulpit to
change Joe Manchin’s mind?”
A good question! And the answer may well be “none.” But the primary
advocate of the Green Lantern theory of domestic politics over the past
two years has been Joe Biden. The central policy argument of his
campaign, repeated throughout the primaries and general election, was
that he, alone among all other Democratic contenders, would be able to
win Republican support for his agenda on the basis of his character and
his skill at leveraging personal relationships built over nearly half a
century in Washington. By implication, conservative members of his own
party weren’t to be worried about. But by now, just over a month into
his term, it should be clear even to those who bought into this
extraordinary lie that conservative Democrats are the ones running the show.
If it really is the case that Manchin and Sinema can’t be won over, we
should come to an important conclusion: Congressional politics is mostly
a fraud.
If it really is the case that Manchin and Sinema can’t be won over, we
should come to an important conclusion: Congressional politics is mostly
a fraud. Over the past year, many have found the size and design of the
coronavirus relief packages Congress has put together encouraging. And
it is genuinely good to know when a once-in-a-century global crisis
kills over half a million people in this country, our legislators are
capable of stretching themselves enough to temporarily supplement and
expand unemployment benefits, send Americans a set of means-tested
stimulus payments, and perhaps pass a large expansion of the child tax
credit. But the prospects for fully elective Democratic economic and
social policies—the minimum wage, immigration reform, climate
legislation, and all the rest—still do not seem very promising.
Between now and the midterm elections next year, we will hear from
Democratic leaders that the solution is electing more Democrats and
giving the party the resources it needs to do so: more donations, more
canvassing, and more voting. We’ll also hear from progressives who will
insist that the solution is defeating the Democratic establishment with
progressive candidates all over the country: more donations, more
canvassing, and more voting. But it’s all nonsense: every part of it,
top to bottom, start to finish.
What Democrats have in the place of a constructive politics is a set of
interlocking pyramid schemes operated by people who know full well that
no matter how many doors are knocked on, how many calls are made, how
many alarmingly titled fundraising emails are opened, and how many
people show up to the polls, whether or not anything significant happens
in Congress depends mostly upon a relatively small set of people in a
few very specific places: the most conservative Democrats in the country
and the moderate-to-conservative states that have elected them. They are
the ones who will decide whether the filibuster goes or whether
legislation the party tries to jimmy through reconciliation will pass.
No matter how much work is put into gaining Democratic majorities, they
will have the power to invalidate them, denying Democrats any reasonable
hope of utilizing a chamber structurally skewed in the Republican
Party’s favor. Progressives can talk themselves blue about primaries,
but activating a progressive electorate in, say, West Virginia is going
to take more than one election cycle, or two, or five, and Manchin isn’t
up for reelection until the end of Biden’s first term anyway.
Many Americans have already come to the fully justified conclusion that
the design of the Electoral College has rendered their votes in
presidential elections effectively meaningless. It is trivial to imagine
many Democrats telling themselves the same about Congress in November
next year. Maybe it’s enough to cost Democrats control of Congress.
Maybe it isn’t. It’s not obvious that it matters: If the Democratic
Party cannot utilize congressional majorities, there’s not much reason
to invest heavily in gaining or retaining them beyond the hope that the
party might hold enough seats to prevent Republicans from regaining
control and passing a destructive agenda under a Republican president.
Unless Democrats figure out how to change the game in the Senate and
until demographic and ideological conditions are right in pivotal
states, angling for more will be a waste of time, money, energy, and
attention that might be better spent on subnational politics and
organizing our communities and workplaces.
Osita Nwanevu
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/osita-nwanevu>@OsitaNwanevu
<https://twitter.com/OsitaNwanevu>
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