Bernie Sanders Stands Up For The Middle Class By Dropping a Huge Fact Bomb On The Senate

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In the midst of a Senate budget vote-a-rama that Republicans are filling with anti-Obamacare and economy killing votes, Senator Bernie Sanders took the Senate floor and dropped the fact bomb that raising the minimum wage is real job creator.

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Sen. Sanders said, “The simple truth is that in America people working full time should not be living in poverty. Since 1968, the real value of the federal minimum wage has fallen by close to thirty percent, and people all over this country and in state after state on their own have voted to raise the minimum wage. And, by the way, in state after state where the minimum wage has gone up, more jobs have been created. Let us stand today with the tens of millions of workers who are struggling to put food on the table to take care of their families.”

The Sanders amendment to raise the federal minimum wage failed to pass 48-52. The good news for Democrats and the left is that Sen. Sanders fell just three votes short of passage as just a simple majority of fifty-one votes are required to pass budget amendments.

Labor Department data for the first six months of 2014 revealed that the 13 states that raised their minimum wage created more jobs than the 37 that didn’t, “In the 13 states that boosted their minimums at the beginning of the year, the number of jobs grew an average of 0.85% from January through June. The average for the other 37 states was 0.61%.”

There are decades worth of data and studies that confirm what Sen. Sanders was saying. The Republican opposition to raising the minimum wage is ideological. The anti-minimum wage position lacks credible non-partisan statistics and data to support its claims. Republicans hang their opposition on a myth that raising the minimum wage kills jobs, but 64 studies have proven that the Republican talking point to be false.

Sen. Sanders dropped a dose of reality on Senate Republicans today. If the 52 Republican Senators who voted no really wanted to boost the economy, the first thing they should do is reverse course and support raising the minimum wage.

Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association