Political Positions of Ted Kennedy - Wage and Price Controls

Wage and Price Controls

Kennedy was a longtime advocate of raising the minimum wage. He helped pass the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007, which incrementally raises the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 over a two-year period. The bill also included some controversial tax cuts for small businesses and higher taxes for many $1 million-plus executives. Kennedy was quoted as saying, "Passing this wage hike represents a small, but necessary step to help lift America's working poor out of the ditches of poverty and onto the road toward economic prosperity".

In the 1970s, Kennedy joined with fellow senators Ernest Hollings and Henry M. Jackson in a press conference to oppose President Gerald Ford's request that Congress end Richard Nixon's price controls on domestic oil, which had helped to cause the gasoline lines during the 1973 Oil Crisis. Kennedy said he believed ending the price controls (which have been blamed for increasing America's dependence on foreign oil and were ended in 1981) would produce "no additional oil."