Democrats unveil legislation raising federal minimum wage to $17 an hour
Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced the Raise the Wage Act of 2025 on Tuesday in both chambers with hopes of increasing the federal minimum wage.
The bill would raise the minimum wage to $17 by 2030 according to the Economic Policy Institute. The current federally mandated hourly wage is $7.25 and has not increased since 2009.
'No person working full-time in America should be living in poverty. The Raise the Wage Act will increase the pay and standard of living for nearly 22 million workers across this country,' said Scott, who is the ranking member of the House Committee on Education and Workforce.
'Raising the minimum wage is good for workers, good for business, and good for the economy. When we put money in the pockets of American workers, they will spend that money in their communities,' he added.
The legislation, which has 142 co-sponsors in the House, would index future pay increases while phasing out the subminimum wage for tipped workers and subminimum wage for youth workers in addition to ending subminimum wage certificates for workers with disabilities.
'In the year 2025, a job should lift you out of poverty, not keep you in it. At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, we can no longer tolerate millions of workers trying to survive on just $10 or $12 an hour,' Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats, said in a release. He described current pay rates as a 'starvation wage.'
'Congress can no longer ignore the needs of the working class of this country. The time to act is now,' the ranking member on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions continued.
The lawmakers' proposed legislation would account for a gradual increase in the federal minimum wage over a five-year period.
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CBS News
9 minutes ago
- CBS News
Planned PBS, NPR cuts would overwhelmingly hit outlets in states Trump won, report finds
The looming federal funding cuts to public television and radio would overwhelmingly gut outlets in states won by President Trump in 2024, according to a new congressional report. Approximately 60% of the hundreds of radio and television stations that could suffer funding cuts are in Trump-won states, according to a congressional report obtained by CBS News from Senate Democrats. The organizations that would be affected include public media outlets in cities as large as Houston and Miami, as well as smaller stations in tiny communities like Douglas, Wyoming, which has a population of 6,000 and hosts the Wyoming State Fair. The widespread cuts to public radio and television are a component of a Republican congressional plan to eliminate $9 billion in funding for programs approved before President Trump's second term began. The proposed rescissions package, which is scheduled for a House vote Thursday, includes $1.1 billion in cuts for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding to NPR and PBS. The cuts to public broadcasting are being touted by the Trump administration and Republicans as an effort to slash taxpayer funding for news media outlets they accuse of being "liberal" or politically biased in their content. Advocates for public broadcasting have lambasted the cuts as destructive, needless and harmful to communities that have very limited sources of local broadcast news. They also deny allegations of political bias. The list of hundreds of TV and radio outlets facing funding cuts shows a broad range of impact. Major public television and radio stations in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C., could each lose nearly $1 million in grants in the coming months. An FM community public radio station in Carbondale, Colorado, which touts itself as "Public access radio that connects community members to one another and the world," received $145,000 in federal grant funding last year. At each of the public media outlets, the list shows reductions that are sizable enough to potentially require staffing cuts, programming reductions or news cutbacks that threaten to exacerbate shortages of local news content. CBS News' review of proposed grant cuts shows Alabama, a state with an estimated 215 public media employees, would lose as much as $3 million in funding for its public television outlets in the coming months. In South Dakota, a sparsely populated state that nonetheless receives $3 million in funds for public broadcasting employees, the funding cuts would gut money for at least 20 media outlets, according to the report provided by congressional aides to CBS News. "The path to better public media is achievable only if funding is maintained. Otherwise, a vital lifeline that operates reliable emergency communications, supports early learning, and keeps local communities connected and informed will be cut off with regrettable and lasting consequences," said Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. "Federal funding for the public broadcasting system is irreplaceable," Harrison said. "Public media serves all — families and individuals, in rural and urban communities — free of charge and commercial free." Both PBS and NPR have sued the Trump administration over previous executive orders cutting their funding, with lawyers for both alleging that among other issues, the cuts violate the First Amendment. PBS CEO Paula Kerger previously said on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" that while PBS only receives 15% of its funding from the federal government, some of its smaller stations receive up to 50% of their funding from federal sources and said the risks to the smaller stations are "existential" if the funding is cut. NPR CEO Katherine Maher has said roughly 1% of the organization's budget comes directly from federal dollars. Some of the many impacted public radio and TV stations have posted messages protesting the proposed cuts in funding. The social media account of a Baltimore public radio station leader said, "This isn't hypothetical—it's real, it's happening, and it places the future of local, trusted public media at serious risk. Let me be clear: this is not a symbolic move. If approved, this action could irreparably damage the local public media." Rural communities, often referred to as "news deserts" because of the lack of local news organizations, would suffer the brunt of the pain. According to a joint statement by Rep. Mark Amodei, a Nevada Republican, and Rep. Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat, "Rural broadcasters face significant challenges in raising private funds, making them particularly vulnerable if government funding is cut." Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat who is the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement to CBS News, "Trump wants Congress to vote to cut off public radio broadcasts our constituents count on for weather forecasts, emergency alerts, and updates on what's going on in their community—and force layoffs at local TV stations." House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has championed the cuts and sought to rally support ahead of Thursday's vote on the rescissions package. "House Republicans will fulfill our mandate and continue codifying into law a more efficient federal government," Johnson said in a statement. "This is exactly what the American people deserve." In April, the White House released a statement saying taxpayers had funded NPR and PBS "for too long" and said they've "spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as 'news.'" The White House Office of Management and Budget did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Zohran Mamdani brings the Bernie Sanders method to New York
NEW YORK — 'It's easy to forget now,' said Zohran Mamdani, 'but four years ago, Eric Adams was hailed as the new face of Democratic Party politics.' Mamdani, a 33-year old state assemblyman and member of Democratic Socialists of America, had just launched a canvass in Harlem with 100 of his campaign's 29,000 volunteers. He was waiting out a summer rainstorm in a coffee shop, laying out his strategy for the June 24 Democratic mayoral primary — briefly interrupted by three young women who saw him, gasped, and called him 'the mayor.' The candidate finished his point: Adams, who quit an unwinnable primary to seek election as an independent, had 'pitted different sets of New Yorkers against each other, so as to evade any actual institutional response' to the city's problems. A new mayor could confront the Trump administration, which Adams decided not to do. He could also prove that progressives, if given the keys to a city, could make life cheaper and safer. To get there, and past former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, he's proposed $10 million in upper-income and corporate tax hikes, for which he'd need improbable sign-off from the state. Four years ago, Democrats saw their future in a tough-talking Black ex-cop who seemed to synthesize calls for racial justice and safer streets. Now, even as its Washington wing frets about finding moderate candidates to remake the party's damaged, elitist image, the biggest city in the country is considering a move in the opposite direction. That would be toward the Bernie Sanders model: A proud socialist and critic of modern Israel who promises huge new taxes and an expansion of city government. 'We've allowed this language of tackling fraud and waste, and prioritizing efficiency, to become the language of the right, when in fact it should be the language of the left,' said Mamdani. 'If you are passionate about public goods and about public service, you have to be just as passionate about public excellence.' Thirteen days out from the primary, the race for Adams's job has evolved into a competition between Mamdani and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, with seven candidates trailing behind. Five are trying to notch enough ranked-choice votes to win the final count; state senator Jessica Ramos and businessman Whitney Tilson are largely running to stop Mamdani. None had built campaigns quite as ready for this moment, as Democratic anger at the Trump presidency boils over. Mamdani did not join other Democrats in renouncing the 'defund the police' movement. He defended his support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, and his opposition to a 'Jewish state' of Israel instead of one that defended 'equal rights' unlinked from religion. Those had been candidate-killing issues in other campaigns. But New York Democrats will vote while the Trump administration is ramping up immigration raids and enforcement in major cities; when Israel's 20-month war in Gaza has infuriated younger voters; and when the cost of housing and groceries has become a bigger issue than crime. In polling conducted by Data for Progress, which found Mamdani only narrowly behind Cuomo in the ranked-choice vote, 28% of voters ranked 'housing' as their top issue, 20% ranked other economic issues, and 18% ranked 'crime and public safety.' Support for Israel didn't rank. 'Trump has shown us that on one side of politics, there's a limitless imagination, and on the other, we are constantly constructing an ever-lowering ceiling,' Mamdani told Semafor. He has promised to freeze rent, make city buses fare-free, open city-run discount groceries, and raise taxes on the richest New Yorkers and businesses to pay for this. Those promises sounded more credible, he said, after Democrats watched the new president demand deeper tax cuts at the same time he wanted to buy Greenland. 'I'm talking about less money than Andrew Cuomo gave to Elon Musk as a corporate tax break.' Mamdani entered the race in October, when conventional wisdom said that a more experienced, less progressive candidate could unseat the scandal-plagued Adams. City Comptroller Brad Lander positioned himself early as that candidate, joining the campaign before Mamdani; Adrienne Adams, the (unrelated) city council speaker, jumped in three months ago, after Adams' deal with the Trump DOJ effectively ended his campaign as a Democrat. Cuomo entered the race weeks later, and neither Lander nor Adams has been able so far to dislodge Mamdani as the ex-governor's biggest threat. The ranked-choice voting system complicates any other candidate's strategy. Voters up to five candidates on their ballots, and tabulators count their preferences until one candidate gets a majority. In 2021, the first year under the new system, city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia was the first choice of only 20% of primary voters, but nearly won the primary, because so many Democrats marked her as an alternative, lower on their ballots. 'The state of politics for New York right now for the Democratic Party is really an amazing litmus test for the Democratic Party across the nation,' Adrienne Adams told the New York Editorial Board, in one of its candidate interviews. Progressive groups and leaders, like the Working Families Party and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have urged voters to leave Cuomo off their ballots and rank only the candidates they align with most. For the WFP, that was Mamdani in first place, followed by Lander, followed by Adams, followed by state senator Zellnor Myrie; for Ocasio-Cortez, it was Mamdani, Adams, Lander, former Comptroller Scott Stringer, and Myrie. The non-Cuomo alternative candidates have sometimes portrayed Mamdani as green and unrealistic. But they've been busier introducing themselves as the responsible alternatives to Cuomo, appealing to the 50% of likely primary voters who view him unfavorably. 'If I'm running against someone, I'm running against Andrew Cuomo. He's who's leading in the polls,' Lander said in an interview after a forum for Jewish voters in the Upper West Side. 'I'm running against a corrupt, abusive, self-serving politician who's only running to rehearse his own grievances.' Mamdani's buoyant, omnipresent social media campaign has been hard for Lander and the rest of the field to compete with. When the spotlight has fallen on him, he has kept it by proposing simpler, bigger, and more aggressive ideas, like free childcare and a graduated rise to a $30 minimum wage. Justin Brannan, a city council member running for comptroller with Mamdani's support, said that he would not support him on BDS. But Adams, he said, had helped create the conditions for an electorate that craved an anti-austerity agenda, and didn't want to be told it was impossible. 'New York City used to be the place for big ideas, and somewhere along the way, we just stopped doing them,' said Brannan. 'De Blasio with universal pre-K was, like, the last time we did something big. The past almost four years with Eric Adams, we've been like, 'Oh, if we can keep the libraries open six days a week, that's a huge victory.'' At the Upper West Side 'New York Jewish Agenda' forum, Stringer proposed a $1 billion 'very, very rainy day' fund to protect the city from Trump administration attacks on grants or programs. Lander suggested putting 'less than $100 million' of the city's Medicaid funding into an independent authority 'so we can provide reproductive and gender affirming care' without Trump interference. Three days later, Mamdani summoned reporters to the Financial District for his plan to 'Trump-proof' New York: The taxes that would raise $10 billion, and total resistance to his deportations. Asked if he agreed with Mayor Adams that the NYPD should arrest protesters who interfered with ICE enforcement, Mamdani rejected the premise. 'It's ironic to hear that from a mayor who literally drove on the sidewalk in the final days of the previous mayoral election,' he said. 'This is an indication of their willingness to be accomplices to what is going on and what ICE agents are inflicting upon New Yorkers.' Six months ago, that answer might have been a problem for Mamdani. But most Democrats assumed, at that time, he had a lower ceiling — that the positions he'd taken would hold him down. After Mamdani's 'Trump-proof' press conference, an X account that clips news interviews shared one of the candidate sticking to his position that ICE should be abolished altogether. 'A lawless president does not mean we abolish entire agencies and our laws,' Adrienne Adams wrote on top of the video. 'People elect us as leaders to solve problems, not pledge allegiance to rigid ideologies.' One day later, she deleted that response, which had been torn apart by pro-Mamdani commenters. It was not, according to her campaign, what she really wanted to say. The decline of Eric Adams, since he wrapped himself around the president's finger, was the catalyst for Mamdani's rise. He presided over falling crime, which lowered the salience of that issue; he suggested that the forced busing of migrants from Texas, to take advantage of the city's generous sheltering laws, was forcing austerity on the city. As Adams receded, with Trump in office, the agenda changed. Mamdani's campaigning changed it too. His early ad campaign, put together by the team that made ads for Bernie Sanders and John Fetterman, got him into the conversation with candidates (Lander et al) who were taken more seriously as potential mayors. He leapt over them as Cuomo's closest competitor — and then put him into the cohort of potential mayors. This involved a lot of risks, taken in attention-getting ways, like his visit to the courthouse where a grad student leader of Gaza protests was being arraigned. Following the candidates, I heard many times that Trump had given Democrats envy of enormous plans that were crisp and memorable and not green-eyeshaded to death; Mamdani was the only contender doing that. Two years ago, some of the same dynamics here played out in Chicago — which has an all-party runoff system, not a Democratic primary then a general election. Voters forced a choice between Brandon Johnson, an anti-austerity progressive, and Paul Vallas, a conservative Democrat who, unfortunately for his campaign, was on tape attacking Barack Obama. If Mamdani wins this primary, I'd expect the specter of Johnson, who is tremendously unpopular now, to hover over New York. Adams is already running as an independent; Cuomo has the ability to. Tilson's campaign, after Cuomo's, is the most oriented around stopping Mamdani. At a weekend stop at a Ukrainian festival, after he gave a short speech while wearing a patch-covered jacket from his trips to bring aid to that country, he warned of a city that would be threatening to Jewish New Yorkers and far more poor, if Mamdani were able to win. 'We are the wealthiest city in the world,' said Tilson. 'I think he and the DSA people he surrounds himself with would create a hostile business environment that would drive away businesses and hurt economic growth.' For In These Times, the socialist writer and editor Bhaskar Sunkara asks whether Mamdani can become the millennial generation's Bernie Sanders. 'Mamdani has shown that it's possible to build a campaign that is simultaneously insurgent and competent.' In the New York Times, Nicholas Fandos studies Mandani's biography, which Cuomo is attacking as scarily unfit for a serious mayor. 'There are candidates in the field with exciting ideas and no track record of delivering on them,' said Lander. In The Free Press, Olivia Reingold why the current trend in the primary is a 'nightmare scenario' for Cuomo, and for New Yorkers who might have supported Adams again. For the Manhattan Institute, Liena Zagare why most of the non-Cuomo candidates are not using their sharpest knives on Mamdani, even as he soars.
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump will target US employers in next phase of immigration crackdown, Homan says
The Trump administration is planning to ramp up civil and criminal prosecutions of companies that employ workers without legal status, White House border czar Tom Homan said in an interview Wednesday. 'Worksite enforcement operations are going to massively expand,' Homan said. The White House has faced criticism from Democrats and even its own anti-immigration allies for exaggerating an immigrant crime wave while holding harmless the employers whose decisions shape huge sectors of the American economy. President Donald Trump 'won't prosecute companies for bribery and won't prosecute companies for hiring illegal immigrants,' Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., said on X Tuesday. 'This administration just takes care of its donors.' But behind the scenes, American companies are 'freaking out' about the possibility of civil and criminal sanctions, or about the operational impact of losing a huge labor force, said Chris Thomas, a partner at Holland & Hart, who represents employers in immigration cases. He said clients have been 'calling in a panic — asking if they should be looking for ways to cut out potentially undocumented workers.' (He added that his clients do not know themselves to be employing any.) Employers are 'very scared — folks in LA, particularly,' said Bruce Buchanan, a leading immigration lawyer based in Nashville. Trump appeared to respond to those worries on Thursday morning: 'Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,' he posted on Truth Social, promising that 'changes are coming.' For now, however, Homan confirmed that employers' fears are justified. Though the Trump administration prefers to focus on 'sanctuary' city policies that prevent police from turning over migrants who have committed crimes, this week's turmoil in Los Angeles began when federal agents raided four workplaces in the city's garment district as part of criminal investigations. Homan said the government will seek sanctions against employers. And major public companies have begun to warn investors that their models depend on migrant labor: 'Increased enforcement efforts with respect to existing immigration laws by governmental authorities may disrupt a portion of our workforce or our operations,' Smithfield, a major meatpacker, wrote in late March, the first time such language had appeared in its securities filings. DoorDash said in a recent filing that a crackdown 'may result in a decrease in the pool of Dashers.' 'They're coming here for a better life and a job, and I get that,' Homan said. 'The more you remove those magnets, the less people are going to come. If they can't get a job most of them aren't going to come.' Federal authorities have generally avoided targeting companies for a range of reasons, including the high burden of proof under laws that require showing that employers affirmatively knew the workers they hired lacked legal status. Unlike most developed economies, the US has no standardized national requirement that employers use its system for checking workers' papers, known as eVerify — and many workers evade that system by using a different legal worker's identity. Trump's first term saw some stepped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement action against employers, with a two-step nationwide audit in 2018 and a record-setting $80 million civil settlement against the giant Asplundh Tree Experts over an investigation that began in the Obama years. Allies had expected the enforcement, which typically comes as much as a year after worksite raids, to ramp up before the coronavirus pandemic derailed immigration enforcement. Employer enforcement 'makes sense, but it has political impact on both sides,' Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told Semafor. 'Many entrepreneurs who are Republican by inclination would protest mightily. They can't have it both ways.' Such a move 'would reverberate through Congress,' he said. A concerted focus on employer enforcement would also shake huge segments of the US economy. Almost a quarter of construction workers lack legal status, a 2021 survey found, and as many as half of meatpacking workers. A focus on those industries could also undercut two of Trump's campaign promises: to make housing more affordable and bring down food prices. 'I won on the border, and I won on groceries,' he told NBC's Kristen Welker in December. President Trump suggested in April that he would propose a guest worker program for some of those businesses: 'We have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to need people.' But ICE raided a Nebraska meatpacking plant this week. 'Congress has a job to do,' Homan said. 'We're going to do worksite enforcement operations until there's a deal made.' When I first asked Homan about employers' role, he turned to talking points about sanctuary cities and the importance of sending agents in to arrest 'bad guys' who municipal authorities wouldn't turn over. Are employers, I asked, 'bad guys' in his view? 'Depends,' he replied. 'I know some employers don't know a fraudulent document from a legal document. But I truly believe that nobody hires an illegal alien from the goodness of their heart. They hire them because they can work them harder, pay them less, and undercut their competition — that hires US citizen employees, and drive wages down.' And yet, if and when the Trump administration moves past the popular, theatrical pursuit of alleged gang members and criminals, the White House and Congress will need to make hard decisions about how America sees its vast migrant workforce. Even the most dedicated restrictionists, like Homan, acknowledge that criminals are a tiny minority. 'Most illegal aliens are regular working stiffs,' said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. 'If you're not going after those people, you're not going to change the fundamental calculus.' (Krikorian is a longtime leader of the US anti-immigration movement — a figure who was so marginal in the Republican Party 20 years ago that when I, as a young reporter for the conservative New York Sun, tried to quote him, my editor told me he was beyond the pale. Now he's the intellectual architect of White House policy.) Gallego's comment suggests that Democrats, flailing for an affirmative policy on the border and immigration, may also see employers, rather than workers, at the center of the debate. The 'magnet' of migration is a decades-long, tacit agreement that meatpackers, construction companies, and farmers can employ migrants without any real penalties, and without the kind of tax and regulatory enforcement that's common across other developed countries. The US has struggled for decades to reach an agreement to regularize that system. Restrictionists have long dreamed of trading the legalization of immigrants who arrived illegally as children, known as Dreamers, for broad use of employment authorization. But many in Trump's movement simply want fewer immigrants, pitting them against big American business and Democrats alike, and while the outlines of a deal have been clear since the early 2000s, the prospect of a bipartisan agreement seems as remote as ever. The mixed signals toward employers have fed cynicism among those who like Trump's economic nationalism. 'The contradiction at the heart of the administration's approach reveals a fundamental tension between populist rhetoric and pro-business reality. While cameras roll for dramatic deportation footage, the industries dependent on illegal migration are maintaining business as usual. This disconnect could ultimately undermine the economic nationalism that propelled the Trump campaign to victory,' Lee Fang wrote on Substack. Trump's focus on immigrants with criminal records in US cities has produced an expanding national conflict, per The New York Times. the apprehension among employers, who are bracing for a wave of audits.
