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."
Read more about this topic: Political Positions Of Ted Kennedy
Famous quotes containing the words wage, price and/or controls:
“It is the women of Europe who pay the price while war rages, and it will be the women who will pay again when war has run its bloody course and Europe sinks down into the slough of poverty like a harried beast too spent to wage the fight. It will be the sonless mothers who will bend their shoulders to the plough and wield in age-palsied hands the reaphook.”
—Kate Richards O’Hare (1877–1948)
“One has to have run a household before one can know the price of rice and firewood, and one has to have raised children before one can understand a parent’s love.”
—Chinese proverb.
“We’ve got to figure these things a little bit different than most people. Y’know, there’s something about going out in a plane that beats any other way.... A guy that washes out at the controls of his own ship, well, he goes down doing the thing that he loved the best. It seems to me that that’s a very special way to die.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)