“Tripling the minimum wage to $22 an hour from its current $7.25 an hour has been suggested by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who until now had seemed to be keeping a low profile after defeating Republican Scott Brown in November for the Massachusetts seat.
“If we started in 1960, and we said [that] as productivity goes up, that is as workers are producing more — then the minimum wage was going to go up the same. And if that were the case, then the minimum wage today would be about $22 an hour,” said Warren, the administration’s former Special Advisor for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Warren was speaking at last week’s Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on “Keeping up with a Changing Economy: Indexing the Minimum Wage.”
Warren added: “So my question is . . . What happened to the other $14.75? It sure didn’t go to the worker.”
Panelist Arindrajit Dube, an assistant professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, responded to Warren’s inquiry by drawing another comparison that appeared to suggest that the approximately $14 difference between today’s actual minimum wage and Warren’s hypothetical minimum wage was going to the nation’s top 1 percent of earners….”
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