One of President Biden's top priorities
in his first month in office
has been passing a coronavirus relief bill,
which makes sense.
I mean, people spent an entire year
having to smell their own breaths.
The least they can get in return is some compensation.
Unfortunately, though, to actually get the bill passed,
Biden needs the support of the United States Senate,
and they're about as supportive as a YouTube comments section.
Just today, Biden announced
a new income limit on who will be getting
those $1,400 checks,
because moderate Democrats
objected to the cost of the bill.
And that's after one of the most popular pieces of the bill
has already been stripped out.
President Biden's bid to double the federal minimum wage
apparently will not be part of his COVID relief package.
Democrats planned to pass the president's plan
through a budget process called reconciliation.
That allows Democrats to pass
a big package in the Senate with a simple majority,
but the trade-off is that the bill
can only involve taxing and spending.
The nonpartisan Senate parliamentarian,
Elizabeth MacDonough, decided the minimum wage provision
didn't meet that standard.
That means it is going to be impossible
for senators, the Democratic senators here
to pass that bill through the Senate,
because there are certainly not the 60 votes necessary
to do it as part of that package.
Damn.
Who knew accomplishing nothing could be so complicated.
But, yeah, apparently,
thanks to the rules of the Senate
and the ruling of the Senate parliamentarian,
the stimulus bill can no longer contain
a raise in the minimum wage.
And if you're wondering
what a Senate parliamentarian even is,
well, they're basically the loser
who actually reads all the Monopoly directions
before the game starts.
And because of that, they get to block legislation.
It's just kind of weird that America
goes through this whole grueling election.
Like, it's this four-year-long process.
"Who's it gonna be? We're voting. We're debating."
It's a process to choose everyone who makes the laws.
And then there's just this one unelected person
who can overrule them all.
You know? Like, I don't remember Abraham Lincoln saying,
"This is a government of the people,
"by the people and for the people.
"As long as it's cool with Liz.
Yes, Liz?"
So, why is there such a bitter fight
over the federal minimum wage?
Well, you're about to find out in our brand-new segment,
Let's Get Fiscal.
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A federal minimum wage
is not a new idea in the United States.
In fact, America has had one since 1938,
when all workers were guaranteed 25 cents an hour.
It was a guarantee
that no matter how menial a job you had,
you could always afford
to play a round of Street Fighter II.
The problem is that while a lot has changed since then,
the minimum wage hasn't changed as much as you might think.
WOMAN: This is a chart of the minimum wage
in the United States over the past 60 years.
You can see how it's gone up and up and up
from a dollar an hour in 1960
to $7.25 today.
If you take the same line but adjust it for inflation,
you'll see the problem.
Every time the minimum wage has been raised,
inflation has dragged it right back down.
Really, America's minimum wage hasn't gone up.
It's essentially stayed the same since the '80s.
NEWSWOMAN: The current federal minimum wage
hasn't moved since 2009.
It's the longest time the country has gone
without raising the minimum wage.
NEWSMAN: Look at this. To feed a family of four
for a week in 2009,
you'd have to work 17 hours on minimum wage.
Now it's 20 hours.
To pay your monthly rent, 116 hours back in '09.
151 hours in 2019.
And to pay a year of medical bills,
you'd have to work 285 more hours in 2019
than you had to work in 2009.
Yeah, that's right.
The minimum wage hasn't been raised since 2009.
And when you account for inflation,
it actually hasn't gone up since the 1980s.
I mean, think about that.
The last time the minimum wage had really been raised,
we were all out on the streets doing pantsula.
I mean, that's what we were doing in South Africa.
Like, the '80s didn't just happen in America, you know.
And while the minimum wage has remained stagnant,
the prices of everything from rent to health care
have gone way up.
So, if working a minimum-wage job in 1989
could pay for a heart transplant,
now all you can afford
is having one of those candy hearts
taped to your chest.
And even then, you got to buy it on credit.
Now, raising the minimum wage
is an extremely popular idea,
and 59% of Americans think that it should be
at least $15 an hour.
But in conservative circles,
a lot of people think that some workers
simply don't need any more money.
It's not about, like, who's starving and who's not.
It's about... The minimum wage is designed
as the first rung on the ladder
to get people in the workplace and then up.
It was never designed for, uh, someone to feed a family on.
Uh, it was never designed to be a 40-hour-a-week wage.
My nephew here in-in Cleveland, Ohio, right now,
he's working a-an $8- or $10, um, an-hour
landscaping job for the summer.
That's not a living wage.
But it shouldn't be. It should--
it should motivate him to keep going after something more.
My grandson works at McDonald’s for minimum wage in Arizona.
He doesn't need to make $15 an hour.
The wage in place for entry-level employees
is so that they can get a job.
If you're supporting a family of four,
you definitely shouldn't be working a minimum wage job.
Here's the thing:
opponents of minimum wage increases can pretend
that the only people working these jobs are 16-year-olds
just trying to save up for a bag of weed that's actually oregano.
But the truth is half of the people
who'd benefit from a minimum wage increase
are between the ages of 25 and 54,
and over a quarter of them have children.
I mean, it would be nice
if only teenagers had to work these jobs,
just like it would be nice if teenagers were the only ones
who ran away from home when life got too tough,
but that's just not reality.
And you'd think this would be easy
for politicians to understand.
But the problem is a lot of them
just aren't looking at the data.
Instead, they're reminiscing
about how things were when they last worked a minimum wage job.
Growing up in a small town,
um, I worked for less than the minimum wage.
I started busing tables at a dollar an hour.
I went up to two and a quarter
when they moved me up in the-- in the place.
And then I finally made it to cook,
which was big-time.
That was six bucks an hour.
My, uh, first job was also working for minimum wage,
at a sale barn,
$1.60 an hour in 1976.
That's right. I was scooping cow manure for $1.60 an hour.
But in-- within a month's time, I’d worked myself up.
I got a dime raise.
I worked with about 15 other high school classmates
through high school and junior college.
And helped me not have any debt when I finished college as well.
"Yeah, I used to work minimum wage shoveling shit,
"and now look at me--
I get a senator's salary for shoveling shit."
The irony is that, without realizing it,
these guys are making a great case
for raising the minimum wage.
If the minimum wage these senators earned back in the day
had kept pace with inflation,
it would be way higher than the $7.25 that it is now.
And it's great that Senator Marshall left college debt-free
thanks to his cow poop side hustle,
but that's because, back when he graduated,
his college cost $900 a year.
That's what these old dudes don't realize.
When they tell these stories about
"I had to walk ten miles from my house,"
all young people today think is,
"Goddamn, you could afford a house?
Man, that's balling."
So, despite how some people think of the minimum wage,
there are many adults who do need to live on it.
Now, that's not to say that raising the minimum wage
is a magic bullet, because it turns out
it does have a few downsides.
The Congressional Budget Office finds
raising the federal minimum wage would pull 900,000 people out
of poverty and give about 27 million workers a raise.
27 million.
But it comes at a cost.
The CBO says that increase would cost 1.4 million jobs
and-and raise the federal deficit by $54 billion
over a decade.
So there's a trade-off here.
That's right.
If the CBO projections are correct,
then raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour
would help millions of people,
but it would also mean fewer jobs overall.
So you can't ignore that there may be some trade-offs here,
but, then again, that's the case with all policies.
I mean, if you ban assault rifles,
it'll save lives,
but then Don Jr. would have nothing to pose with
to let people know how big his penis is.
So, look, there is nuance there.
But if you ask me,
if a job cannot exist unless it pays unsustainable wages,
then maybe that job shouldn't exist.
Like, maybe America has to find another way
to help those people losing those jobs
or the businesses who need those jobs.
But America needs to do something
about the minimum wage,
because the solution can't be maintaining
the current situation, where you work full-time
and still can't make ends meet.
I mean, if that's allowed to continue,
America will be in such deep shit
that even a senator couldn't shovel out of it.