Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
There is no amount of sarcasm and resentment too great to read into it when I say this: Fan-freaking-tastic. The Senate's Wimp Democrat Caucus is busy trying to decide
how small of a minimum wage increase would be small enough to get their votes.
Sen. Mark Pryor is definitely okay with a minimum wage of $8.50 an hour, a level being sought in a ballot measure in his home state of Arkansas. Oh, wow. More than $17,500 for a year of full-time work. Talk about making work pay! Meanwhile, Sen. Mary Landrieu is concerned about:
... the tipped wage, which would rise from $2.13 an hour to more than $7 an hour by 2019 under the Democrats’ bill and is opposed by the restaurant industry. She isn’t sure where she will ultimately land on $10.10 an hour but said there “may be” a middle ground.
“I’m considering how high the increase should be,” Landrieu said. “So while I’m very supportive and generally supportive, I’m working with a few colleagues to see what maybe we could talk about on that tip wage issue. Republicans, too.”
There's a reason the tipped minimum wage has been stuck at $2.13 for more than 20 years, and it's legislators like Landrieu trying to make the restaurant industry happy by maintaining
rock-bottom deep-poverty wages.
Maybe these wimp Democrats genuinely believe that poverty wages are acceptable. But if they're thinking they're going to get Republicans on board with their proposals, they should listen to Sherrod Brown:
“How do you start negotiating downward when the minimum wage is worth a third less than it was worth in 1968?” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “If the president said $9, [Republicans] would have been against it. If he said $7.75, they probably would have been against it. I don’t think you play that game.”
Exactly.