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Showing posts with label John Boehner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Boehner. Show all posts

Saturday, October 25, 2014

'We Suck' on Minimum Wage, U.S. Labor Chief Says; Christie Has 'Head in the Sand'

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.bloomberg.com

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has “got his head in the sand” when it comes to the plight of minimum-wage earners in his state, U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez said.

“I’ve met with minimum-wage workers in New Jersey,” Perez said today at a Bloomberg News event in Washington. “I’ve met with folks who -- the only raise they got, they’re baggage handlers at Newark Airport, and the only raise they got was when the voters increased the minimum wage.”

President Barack Obama and his administration have been pushing Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from $7.25. Most Republicans in Congress and many Republican governors, including Christie, oppose the increase. The Democratic-led Senate has tried and failed repeatedly to advance the issue, and House Speaker John Boehner has said his Republican-led chamber won’t consider it.

“All the Democrats and the president want to talk about is minimum wage,” Christie, 52, told reporters today at a diner in Bordentown, New Jersey, where he was campaigning for congressional candidate Tom MacArthur, a Republican from Toms River. “The reason they want to do that is because they have not had the kind of growth in this country that we should be having in terms of wages and better jobs.”

New Jersey voters last November approved a constitutional amendment that will increase the...
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Friday, October 18, 2013

The Many Ways the Government Shutdown Hurt Public Health and the Environment

Today's post was shared by RWJF PublicHealth and comes from switchboard.nrdc.org


Political extremists pushed our nation to the brink out of sheer obstinance. Speaker Boehner could have ended this days ago by simply letting the full House vote on reopening the government. Instead, he declared himself a willing hostage to the radical wing of his party.

The reopening of the government and avoiding default are obviously good news. But the deal that allowed it to happen should be a signal to the environmental community to gird for the battles ahead.
The deal puts off the big fights for just a couple of months. House Republicans had a long list of anti-environmental provisions they threatened to add to the debt limit before the Affordable Care Act became their single-minded focus, and they could be part of the brinksmanship next time around....
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