Dems Snuck A $15 Minimum Wage Into The CARES Act — And We’ll All Pay The Price – Issues & Insights

Dems Snuck A $15 Minimum Wage Into The CARES Act — And We’ll All Pay The Price – Issues & Insights
"Buried in a story about the overly generous unemployment “bonus” that Democrats added to the CARES Act is the reason why they insisted on it in the first place — and why it will drag down the recovery once the lockdown ends.
While lawmakers were hammering out the massive $2 trillion bill, a key focus of which was to keep workers connected to their jobs through a loan guarantee program — Democrats insisted on a huge increase in unemployment benefits.
The result was a $600 a week bonus.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer was right to call this “unemployment on steroids.”
Well, guess what?
“The $600 payment aligns with working full time at $15 an hour – the minimum-wage level many Democrats in Congress support,” notes the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal reports that – thanks to this bonus – workers will get an average of $978 in unemployment benefits.
What’s more, “Labor Department statistics show half of full-time workers earned $957 or less each week in the first quarter of 2020.”
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham had it exactly right when he said that:
“You’re literally incentivizing taking people out of the workforce at a time when we need critical infrastructure supplied with workers. If this is not a drafting error, then it’s the worst idea I’ve seen in a long time.”
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