President Obama told Congress Tuesday that it was not the federal government’s job to “make everybody rich, or relieve every hardship,” but that that was no reason why it shouldn’t do more to help people’s finances.
He called on lawmakers to pass a higher minimum wage and to back efforts to provide workers with seven days of paid sick leave. He also endorsed a tax cut of up $3,000 to pay for child care.
“Things like child care and sick leave and equal pay. Things like lower mortgage premiums and a higher minimum wage. These ideas will make a meaningful difference in the lives of millions of families. That is a fact. And that’s what all of us — Republicans and Democrats alike — were sent [to Washington] to do,” Obama said in his State of the Union address Tuesday night.
Issues such as raising the minimum wage have been staples of the Democratic Party agenda for decades, but they have taken on a fresh urgency among lawmakers in recent years. Democrats see them as both a balm for the still-ailing economy and as a way to reconnect with middle-class and lower-middle class “red state” voters. They are issues that they think are both winners and ones Republicans won’t co-op.
“To everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise,” Obama said to resounding applause from his party.
When the president announced his proposal to expand paid sick leave for workers late last week, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said it was a bad idea — but softly.
In an official statement released Friday, Alexander, the new chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, extolled the benefits of the “great freedom” Americans have when it comes to choosing the kind of career they want.
He then added: “One more government mandate, however well-intentioned, will only reduce those freedoms — making it harder for employees to find jobs, negotiate for the things they need, and open and run businesses.”
While a rejection, Alexander’s comment was nevertheless defensive. That probably cheered administration officials. With Democrats now in the minority in Congress, they could use an effective wedge issue against the GOP. Liberals believe that economic populism will be the one, and Obama clearly agrees.
Obama didn’t say Tuesday how much higher the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage should be, but he has endorsed prior calls by congressional Democrats to raise it to $10.10.
Randy Johnson, the Chamber of Commerce’s senior vice president for immigration, labor and employee benefits, argued that the White House’s motives were more political than economic.
“The Democrats made no effort to move legislation when they had large majorities in both the House and the Senate and President Obama ready to sign it after the 2008 elections. If the administration was serious about this they would have tried negotiate a deal,”Johnson said in a statement emailed to Washington Examiner.
Republicans such as Rep. Renee Ellmers, R-N.C., were simply dismissive: “The overarching theme of tonight’s speech — and the president’s time in office — can be summed up as: let’s spend more of your hard-earned taxpayer dollars creating expensive federally-run programs and supporting government-knows-best policies.”
Liberals see it more as the party being reinvigorated by new leaders such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. “From making higher education more affordable to taxing the wealthy and expanding paid leave for working families, the ideas that Senator Warren has brought with her to Washington are clearly driving the national agenda,” said Charles Chamberlain, executive director of the Howard Dean-founded group Democracy for America.
Either way, the president’s State of the Union address makes clear that that is the direction he will push in for the final two years of his term.
In a speech to the AFL-CIO labor federation last week, Labor Secretary Tom Perez went so far as to say that the president’s jobs and wages agenda was a religious imperative.
“This is really about biblical teachings. This is about what is taught in the Quran and what is in the Torah and what we learn about making sure we ‘do unto others,'” Perez said at an Washington event.
The president has already been moving in this direction. With no legislative progress to show, he instead has used what leverage the White House has to advance that agenda without Congress.
In October, Obama finalized an executive order setting $10.10 as the minimum hourly wage for federal contracting. It was a largely symbolic move since federal contractors were already subject to regulations requiring them to pay employees the local “prevailing wage” for that work.
In an executive order last February, President Obama called for the Labor Department to develop new regulations that would effectively force businesses to pay workers more overtime. “We still need to make sure employees get the overtime they’ve earned,” Obama said Tuesday.
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, employers can exempt workers from being eligible for overtime if they make more than $23,000 annually. The department is set to raise that threshold. A report by the Huffington Post last week said officials were settling on $42,000 as the new threshold.
