“What this means is that according to the rules of reconciliation, we can clearly increase the minimum wage to $ 15 per hour,” Sanders said of CBO’s forecasts.
“Let us be clear. “We are never going to get ten Republicans to raise the minimum wage through ‘ordinary order,'” said Sanders, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. “The only way to raise the minimum wage now is to $ 15 an hour. , is to reconcile it with 51 votes through the budget. ”
The wage proposal, S. 53 (117), will gradually increase the federal hourly minimum from $ 7.25 to $ 15 by 2025 and index future increases to average wage growth. It will also eliminate the subminimum covered wage.
Biden on Friday expressed uncertainty over whether the minimum wage provisions would work under conciliation or be scrapped by the Senate MP. “I do not think it will survive,” Biden said.
The Senate MP decides what provisions will make the cut, but congressional leaders can tamper with the language to make it work.
Even if a minimum wage increase can withstand the parliamentary challenges, support for the proposal may not require the 50 votes needed in the Senate to be included in a final package. Sen. Joe Manchin (DW.Va.) has already said he does not support raising the minimum wage to $ 15 an hour. Last week, the Senate approved an amendment by senior Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) by a vote that would ban a $ 15 increase during the pandemic.
Among CBO’s predictions about how a minimum wage increase will affect employees, the budget office estimates that nearly a million people will be lifted out of poverty. At the same time, it will lead to the loss of 1.4 million jobs, which will push hundreds of thousands of workers out of the workforce by the time the federal minimum reaches $ 15 by 2025, excessively affecting the “young, less educated people”, CBO predicted . .
The budget office predicts that the change will affect as many as 27 million workers earning less than or more than $ 15 in 2025. The report estimates that the cumulative salary for employees affected by the increase will increase by $ 333 billion in the ten years following the introduction of the bill.
While Sanders acknowledged the silver lining of the budget office’s deficit projection, he also groaned at the hefty costs CBO estimates for its plan. “I find it difficult to understand how the CBO concludes that raising the minimum wage will increase the deficit by $ 54 billion,” he said, noting that the budget office had previously estimated that it would reduce the deficit by less than $ 54 billion. $ 1 million will increase.
CBO’s predictions contradict Sanders’ argument that his bill would provide overall savings for taxpayers and ultimately reduce the deficit by removing workers from public utilities.
According to the budget office, the bill will increase spending on Medicaid and Medicare, due to the number of people “who lost their jobs as a result of the minimum wage increase and are therefore eligible for the program” and because “payment rates for healthcare providers would be higher.”
The chair of the Home Education and Labor Committee, Bobby Scott (D-Va.), Who is the sponsor of the Home Version of the bill, HR 603 (117), said the report “shows that raising the minimum wage directly and purposefully will act. stimulus for struggling workers and their families. ”
Scott also argued that the CBO forecast “strengthens the case for the gradual increase in the minimum wage through the COVID-19 rescue package.”
Advocacy groups pushing Congress to raise the federal minimum wage also praised the CBO report as a victory.
“There are more than 54 billion reasons for the Senate MP to stand with 32 million workers,” People for Bernie, a grassroots movement that supports Sanders’ presidential bid, said in a statement.
Frances Holmes, a member of the union-backed ‘Fight for $ 15’, says the CBO report “confirms what we already knew – the Senate can raise the minimum wage to $ 15 as part of the COVID relief package.”
“We need no apologies from our country’s leaders,” Holmes said. “We need relief.”
Marianne Levine and Caitlin Emma contributed to this report.