No sign of revived Democratic effort to boost minimum wage to $15 an hour

Since 2009, the federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour. It looks like it will remain there for a while longer.

After promising during the 2020 presidential campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15, President Joe Biden included a provision to do that in his American Rescue Plan, a legislative proposal early in his tenure that was designed to bolster the economy and battle the coronavirus pandemic.

But the minimum wage provision was stripped from the measure before its final passage. 

The Senate considered the American Rescue Plan under "budget reconciliation" rules, which allow the bill to be passed by a simple majority rather than needing to clear a 60-vote threshold. However, to use this process, all provisions in the bill must be deemed by the Senate parliamentarian to have enough of a fiscal impact on the federal government to qualify for inclusion in the bill.

The Senate parliamentarian ruled that the minimum wage provision would not have enough of an impact on the federal government's finances to be included in the bill. So the overall measure passed on a party-line vote, but it didn't include the minimum wage boost.

Senate Democrats have had an opportunity to pursue a minimum wage hike on its own under ordinary rules, but have not done so.

"The $15 an hour national minimum wage promise has definitely been stalled," said Ben Zipperer, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a left-of-center think tank. 

Among the general public, the $15 hourly minimum wage is popular; the Pew Research Center found support among two-thirds of those polled. But business groups and their allies among lawmakers have traditionally fought minimum wage hikes, arguing that they would raise costs for employers and potentially cause job losses. 

One silver lining, Zipperer said, is that Biden has issued an executive order for federal contractors that would raise the minimum wage to $15 in January 2022. An Economic Policy Institute analysis suggested that wages will rise for about 390,000 federal workers. But that's not as sweeping as Biden's campaign promise.

We rate the promise Stalled.