Category: Real Economic Opportunity

The presidential and congressional election results, for obvious reason, deeply overshadowed any of the progressive wins in this election. But there are a few that are worth highlighting so that we don’t lose sight of some hopeful trends underway.

Minimum wage: Four states just voted to up their minimum wage: Arizona, Colorado, Maine and Washington, each representing a 40-60% increase from the current rate. This follows from approved ballot initiatives in California and Washington DC earlier this year, all of which ultimately led to higher pay for roughly 8 million working Americans and paid sick days for 1.9 million, according to the Fairness Project. (An additional 14 states saw wage increases at the beginning of 2016, as scheduled.)

Moreover, 15 cities are currently committed and moving towards a $15 minimum wage, and several states and cities are set to put minimum wage measures up for a vote in the next year or two.

These recent gains are reflective of a generally supportive climate for increasing the minimum wage, across partisan lines. During the 2014 mid-term elections, as CNN reports, four red-leaning states: Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota, all approved minimum wage increases. Since 2000, in fact, at least 15 minimum wage initiatives have been on the ballot; all of them have passed, and often with wide margins. Support for these measures reflects the general public sentiment: an estimated 6 in 10 Americans back the more progressive $15 minimum wage, according to a 2015 poll by the National Employment Law Project.

These local and state-level initiatives are important for several reasons, the most salient of which is that a federal minimum wage increase has been stagnated by partisan politics, and has left millions of Americans well behind. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that today’s federal minimum wage (at $7.25) is nearly a quarter lower than its 1960s inflation-adjusted value. In other words, the federal lag is contributing to today’s widening economic inequality, and increasing reliance on federal safety net programs.

Jobs too: there’s also evidence that higher minimum wages can help to spur job growth, even as reported by Fox news in 2014 following wage increases across several states.

Trending hikes in minimum wages, including in this election, is a positive and progressive way forward for the country.

Whether you’re a Feel the Bern kind of person or supported Hillary throughout, we should all agree that Bernie brought an important issue to the conversation that had otherwise been largely ignored in institutionalized politics: economic inequality.

The Tea Party Movement that began in 2009 started as something of a populist revolt, though skeptics, and rightfully so, also saw the big money behind it: The Billionaire’s Tea Party. All the same, by 2010, dozens of self-proclaimed Tea Party members were in Congress. By contrast, the 2011 Occupy Movement lived hard and died fast, never making real headway in DC, with the exception of a brief stint on K Street where protestors occupied the buildings of lobbyists as a statement against the influence of money in politics.

Without Bernie’s unwavering, and, for some, somewhat relentless hammering of the issue, outcry against America’s widening economic chasm would not have made its way as it did into campaign debate, news coverage, and everyday conversation.

Granted, several obstacles remain: we have yet to see the extent to which a Hillary Clinton administration will continue to push for that progressive of an agenda (I’m too desperately optimistic to even consider a Trump agenda), and the ability for any sort of substantive policy change to take root, a steep obstacle in today’s partisan politics.

But in this moment, there is reason to recognize and appreciate that inequality, which is at unprecedented levels since the eve of the Great Depression, is at least on the agenda in ways that have largely escaped institutionalized politics outside of the usual nod to the “middle class.”