Biden defends $15 minimum wage but lowers hopes on student debt forgiveness

He said there’s evidence to back up his support for a $15-an-hour minimum wage

Joe Biden (getty images)

The president passionately defended his support for a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage at a CNN town hall event in Wisconsin on Tuesday night.

“No one should work 40 hours a week and live in poverty,” Mr Biden said in response to a question from a Trump-supporting small business owner named Randy Lange, who wondered how the proposed wage hike, currently attached to the Biden administration’s Covid relief bill in Congress, might affect his woodworking company. “But it’s totally legitimate for small business owners to be concerned.”

Mr Biden argued that the wage increase wouldn’t lead to major layoffs if it was phased in gradually, and said the majority of economists agreed with him, despite a recent Congressional Budget Office report that it might cause 1.4 million people to lose their jobs, while lifting another 900,000 out of poverty.

“I think there’s equally, if not more, evidence it would grow the economy in the long run and medium run, benefit small businesses as well as large businesses,” he said.

The pandemic has caused the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and addressing economic anxiety was a big theme during the event.

One questioner asked if the president was prepared to eliminate $50,000 in student loan debt for all Americans via an executive order, as some prominent Democrats like senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer have called for.

“I will not make that happen,” Mr. Biden said. “I’m prepared to write off $10,000 [of] debt, but not 50,” he added, confirming his previously stated position on the matter.

The president, long one of the poorest members of Congress, whose children all had tens of thousands in student loan debt, said he had other solutions in mind, including forgiving debt by law, making community college free, tying forgiveness to volunteer programs, and keeping repayment schedules a reasonable percentage of earnings.

He also added he’d make sure that Covid relief money from the federal government went to genuinely small businesses, rather than multi-million dollar corporations with small numbers of employees.

The president took questions from members of the public on a whole host of questions at the event in Milwaukee’s Pabst Theatre, part of his first official trip since being sworn in. Members of the audience, including those who voted for and against him during the 2020 election, grilled him on topics ranging from defunding the police to when schools would re-open.