"Raising the minimum wage to $ 15 would lift 900,000 people out of poverty. It's about time," Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar wrote in a tweet on Monday.
Is this statement true? It is few words, yes, it is true.
Raising the federal minimum wage is expected to reduce poverty in the United States by nearly a million people, according to a study released Monday by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a nonpartisan federal office attached to Congress.
The CBO estimates that the measure could increase the wages of some 17 million workers when it goes into effect in 2025, according to the proposal currently being debated in the Senate.
Another 10 million wage earners whose pay is just above the minimum would also benefit, according to the report.
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However, the CBO study notes that raising the federal minimum wage to $ 15 would also eliminate 1.4 million jobs by 2025 and increase the deficit by $ 54 billion over ten years.
Despite job losses, raising the minimum wage will increase the net pay for the nation's workers considerably, about $ 333 billion more.
Republican opposition
Raising the federal minimum wage is one of the promises President Joe Biden made during the presidential campaign.
Biden included the proposal in the new $ 1.9 trillion aid package to ease the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy.
However, the increase was left out of the plan, after Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst introduced an amendment to prohibit raising the minimum wage during the pandemic.
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Biden has already accepted that the increase will likely not be approved in the aid package.
"I put it on, but I don't think it's going to survive," the president said Feb. 5 in an interview with CBS News.
Senate Republicans are opposed to considering raising the minimum wage.
"A federal minimum wage of $ 15 would be devastating for the hardest hit small businesses, at a time when they can least afford it," Ernst said Thursday, February 4.
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Democrats, for their part, brought the Salary Increase Act back to Congress, legislation that contemplates raising the minimum pay to $ 15.
An initial version of the Act had been approved by the House of Representatives in 2019, but was not voted on in the Senate, which was then controlled by Republicans.
Democratic lawmakers are trying to pass the minimum wage increase through budget reconciliation, a faster process for which they do not need any Republican support for the bill.
In this case, Vice President Kamala Harris would cast a tiebreaker vote in the Senate, which is divided.
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Twelve years unchanged
The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009. It is currently set at $ 7.25 per hour, although the minimum is higher in some states.
In March 2019, the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted that about 2% of Latino workers in the United States receive the minimum wage or less than that.
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According to a poll the Pew Research Center published in July 2019, the majority of Americans (67%) were in favor of raising the minimum wage.
Nearly nine out of 10 Democrats or independents supported the measure and among Republicans, about seven out of 10 people opposed the increase.
In 2019, a report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank, noted that an eventual increase in the minimum wage would benefit, above all, adult workers, most of whom work full time and support a family. .
