Here's some good news for all of you currently grinding your way through a minimum wage job: there's at least one politician in Congress who thinks your salary is far too low.
In a move that is both refreshing and unlikely to change the minds of policy-makers in Washington D.C., Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has put forth an argument for a significantly higher minimum wage in the United States. Just how much higher? Over three times as high, all the way up to $22 an hour.
Warren defended her position on what the wage should be during a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions last Thursday. At first glance, her idea probably seems far-fetched even to the most liberal of reformers. The math behind it, however, speaks for itself.
Warren addressed University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Dr. Arindrajit Dubeat during the hearing in order to bolster her claims:
"If we started in 1960 and we said that as productivity goes up, that is as workers are producing more, then the minimum wage is going to go up the same. And if that were the case then the minimum wage today would be about $22 an hour. So my question is Mr. Dube, with a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, what happened to the other $14.75? It sure didn't go to the worker," queried Warren.
"That is correct," Dube replied. "Since the early '70s, what we have seen is a divergence in the prosperities of different sections of our populations. So, for instance, had the minimum wage kept pace with productivity since 1960... it would have stood around $22 today. To answer your question about the $14, we can answer with the following: Had the minimum wage grown at the same page as income is going to the top 1 percent of the taxpayers, the minimum wage would have stood at $33 before the recession."
That's right, had America continued to compensate its workers for the gains in productivity they provided for their companies, minimum wage would have actually been at $33 a few year ago. There has already been much talk recently of the growing wealth disparity in America, and so it should come as little surprise that the money that should have gone to the workers who were responsible for the rising production instead went to the top 1% of taxpayers.
Though Warren's vision for a minimum wage over $20 is very unlikely to be realized any time soon, there has been a push in Washington to raise it up to some degree. During his State of the Union address, President Obama publicly supported a raise of the minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 up to $9.
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