Category: Minimum Wage

Former Campaign for America\’s Future staffer Anne Thompson got a scoop this past weekend when she asked presidential candidate Mitt Romney about his position on the minimum wage, and he responded by saying he supported indexing the minimum wage \”so it adjusts automatically over time\” with inflation. This is not welcome news on the right,…

Former Godfather\’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain\’s comment a couple of weeks ago that \”I don\’t believe racism in this country today holds anybody back in a big way\” didn\’t cause much of a national stir when he made it. Why would it, when a mixed-race African American is currently the president of the United States…

No one knows why a group of about 10 teenagers surrounded Trell Thomas at a bus stop in downtown Washington earlier this month and beat him so badly that his jaw was broken, causing permanent damage. But Trell has given a lot of thought about how to respond to the climate in Washington and other…

The appointment of economist Alan Krueger, who President Obama named to head the Council of Economic Advisers today, is getting generally favorable reviews from progressive economic commentators. For the unemployed, that means there would be a high-level voice in the administration calling attention to their concerns about the labor market if the Senate confirms his…

There is no \”Texas miracle\” for workers and job-seekers. There is a Texas mirage, painted vividly by conservatives and being sold as the real deal by arch-conservative Texas governor Rick Perry, who may in a few days declare his intent to run for the Republican presidential nomination. The mirage is this: Because Texas doubled-down on…

Speaker Nancy Pelosi will relinquish the gavel to the perpetually tanned, lachrymose Republican leader John Boehner when the new Congress convenes next January. It will be four years after that January 4, 2007 day when she \”broke the marble ceiling\” and became the first woman Speaker in the two-century history of the House. At the…

It has been said before — recently, even — but it bears saying again and again, as any truth does. Conservatives have finally, and completely, abandoned compassion. Progressives spent much of the previous decade declaring the "compassionate conservatism" of the Bush era a cruel joke. Policy gestures in that vein were seldom backed with the…

It hasn\’t even been a year since the Heritage Foundation placed Ireland among the top ten countries on its Economic Freedom Index. I wasn\’t intending to write about Ireland at the time, but any time the Heritage Foundation holds up any country as an economic example attention must be paid. It\’s an invaluable opportunity to…

Former White House budget director Peter Orszag is taking a new approach in his quest to cut Social Security. He\’s playing progressive \”good cop\” to to the ultra-right bad cops of the White House deficit commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Now that Bowles and Simpson (Blimpson?) are done threatening the elderly with their roundhouse…