Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) proposed raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour today but when asked why it should not be raised to $20 an hour Jackson did not answer directly, saying only that “even making the argument for $20 an hour would by far surpass” the goal the minimum wage was designed to reach.
At a Capitol Hill press conference on Wednesday, Jackson was joined by fellow Representatives John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, and Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, to introduce the “Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2012.”
The bill would raise the current minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10 an hour, and tie future increases to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the measure of the average change in prices for a market basket of consumer goods and services. The minimum wage was established by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and Jackson’s bill would apply the 1968 rate adjusted for inflation in today’s dollars.
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