I realize passing the state House is the easiest part of the minimum wage bill’s journey. But hurray :
The Washington state House has voted to raise the state’s minimum wage to $12 an hour.
Representatives voted 51-46 Tuesday afternoon to raise what was already the nation’s highest state hourly minimum wage at $9.47.
The legislation, House Bill 1355, would raise the minimum wage over a four-year period in a series of 50-cent hikes. It goes next to the state Senate for consideration.
Relief for working families all over the state trying to raise a family on or near the minimum wage is a possibility. Nobody is getting rich working the minimum wage, but it’s still better for working families. Of course, now it’s on to the Senate to be watered down or killed outright.
The Bill is currently in the Labor & Commerce committee, chaired by Michael Baumgartner, if you want to contact him, the info is at the link. If you want to contact other members of the committee, you can find them here. If you want to find your legislators, you can find them here. As always, my recommendation is to be polite but firm.
Goldy @GoldyHA
So sad watching Republicans from poor parts of state arguing that their districts are too poor to afford min wage hike.
CBO recently estimated a ‘likely range’ of job losses across the country, should a national minimum wage to $10.10/hr be enacted, with a midpoint of 500,000 and an upper endpoint of 1,000,000.
Goldy, do you think those job losses would come from well-off areas in the country, or disproportionately from those areas already struggling?
And if those state GOP legislators about whom you profess sadness were to instead make you happy by voting for the increase to $12/hr, thereby likely increasing unemployment rates in their constituency even though it would be better, overall, for the employed population in this state, are you still going to use the fact that they receive more money from the state than they pay in as a weapon against them?
@1…
I guess ‘Bob’ the sloppy solipsist really is that stupid.
Good to know.
http://thinkprogress.org/econo.....-buybacks/
Heading for another crash, Rabbit. Better buy gold!
Nick Hanauer @NickHanauer
The question for Republican lawmakers in Washington State today is this: $12 now, or $16 in 16?
Why, because GOP representatives who opposed $12/hr in 2015 might have a different opinion of $16/hr twelve to eighteen months from now?
I bet that in an election year, Hanauer’s question would be harder for Democrats to answer.
Michael Baumgartner is the clown who wants to make Washington a right to work for slave wages state.
@3 Buybacks don’t enrich shareholders unless they sell their shares. Companies love them because if they get in a cash-flow bind it’s much easier to quietly stop buying back shares than to cut the dividend, which everyone notices and gets press. Currently, the ratio of money being spent on buybacks vs. dividends by S&P 500 companies is roughly 2-to-1. As a shareholder, I would much rather receive a cash dividend, and whether a company rewards its shareholders with buybacks or dividends is a factor I consider when shopping for stocks.
Buybacks don’t automatically raise a stock’s price. Many buybacks are badly executed and return little or nothing to shareholders in the form of a higher stock prices. This happens when management “buys high,” which is just as toxic for your returns as when you “buy high and sell low,” and numerous studies have shown that companies are no better at timing stock purchases than you or I.
In fact, market timing or timing individual stocks is impossible, and considered a fool’s errand, which automatically makes buybacks an inferior method of distributing cash to shareholders. But buybacks remain exceedingly popular with managements for the reasons I outlined above.
@4 $12 an hour isn’t rich. It’s a poverty wage. You can’t live on it in Seattle. But Republicans never met an economic problem they didn’t want to “solve” by cutting someone else’s wages. Cheap labor is the heart and soul of conservative economics.