The Associated Press headline read, “House passes $1.9T pandemic bill on near party-line vote,” prompting a quick search for which Republicans joined Democrats in passing it. How naive of me. Two Democrats joined Republicans in opposition: Kurt Schrader of Oregon and Jared Golden of Maine.
CNBC bulleted the main elements of the bill:
- Payments of $1,400 to most individuals, along with the same amount for each dependent. Checks start to phase out at $75,000 in income and go to zero for individuals making $100,000
- A $400 per week unemployment supplement through Aug. 29, along with an extension of programs making millions more people eligible for jobless benefits
- An expansion of the child tax credit to give families up to $3,600 per child over a year
- $20 billion for Covid-19 vaccine distribution and $50 billion for testing and tracing efforts
- $350 billion in state, local and tribal government relief
- $25 billion for assistance in covering rent payments
- $170 billion for K-12 schools and higher education institutions to cover reopening costs and aid to students
- A $15 per hour federal minimum wage, which the Senate parliamentarian will not allow in the reconciliation bill on the other side of the Capitol
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are scrambling to find a way to salvage rasing the minimum wage through some kind of Rube Goldberg mechanism. Talking Points Memo explains:
Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Bernie Sanders (D-VT), who chair the Senate Finance and Budget Committees respectively, have proposed a backdoor approach that the parliamentarian might approve of, one that would involve changing tax policy.
Wyden put out a statement saying that his proposal would impose a 5 percent penalty on the payrolls of big corporations if workers earned less than a certain amount. He also called for a tax credit equal to up to 25 percent of wages for small businesses that pay their workers higher wages. Many of the specific numbers, however, have not yet been made public.
While the proposal is a good faith effort to salvage raising the minimum wage in the current political landscape — it seems unlikely that a standalone bill to raise the minimum wage would attract the 60 Senate votes needed to overcome a filibuster — experts on and off the Hill are already expressing concerns about whether Plan B would be a fitting replacement.
“Proponents of this approach would like nothing better than if everyone paid at least the minimum wage, but we fully expect that some employers will still rather pay the tax,” one Democratic aide told TPM.
In essence, the plan relies on the market in some form to do the job of Congress. Any impact will not be universal and what application there is haphazard.
Arindrajit Dube, of the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst finds that, for example, only “20 percent of minimum wage workers in Oregon are employed by firms with more than 500 employees.” Dube adds, “This is not a substitute for a broad-based minimum wage increase.”
Meanwhile, Democrats dodge addressing mounting a pressure campaign to eliminate the filibuster, that anachronistic Senate loophole by which a minority of senators holds a veto over the heads of the majority. Use the minimum wage fight to build the case, not against the Democrats committed to the status quo , but directly to voters as Digby mentioned weeks ago, quoting Dan Pfeiffer:
This loophole framing is key and should be how we talk, tweet, and post about the issue going forward. Additionally, the poll found that support for filibuster elimination went up when it was explained that it made policies more likely to pass. Passing COVID Relief, background checks for firearms, and infrastructure spending each caused more than 50 percent of respondents to be more likely to support getting rid of the filibuster.
Saying it is not the same as doing it. Pfeiffer added, “Getting rid of the filibuster is not easy. But it can be done. It’s not enough to just yell about those who disagree. We have to do the work.”