As the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve to kick off 2023, the minimum wage automatically increased in more than a dozen states where that figure goes up annually to match inflation.
New York, with its $15 minimum wage, more than double the national minimum of $7.25, was not one of them. But it could be in 2024 if Gov. Kathy Hochul has her way. In Hochul’s State of the State speech earlier this month, a proposal to index the state’s minimum wage to inflation was a centerpiece of an offering that was peppered with big ideas but short on details.
There are numbers already indexed to inflation that affect every American, with Social Security benefits and their 8.7% hike for 2023 leading the list. Federal tax brackets are indexed to inflation, too: The $27,700 standardized deduction for married couples, for instance, is $1,800 higher this year than in 2022.
And when such figures are not indexed to inflation the long-term effect, in a nation with an increasingly gridlocked political system, can become disastrous.
The federal gas tax has been stuck at 18 cents per gallon for 30 years, a span in which both gas prices and the cost of building, maintaining and repairing the roads that this tax supports have skyrocketed, even as fuel efficiency increased and hybrids and plug-ins were introduced, cutting gas tax revenue further. Political will to increase the federal gas tax no longer exists. If the 1992 increase had come with a law tying it to inflation,...
Washington, April 27 Prominent television hosts and journalists have pushed back against online claims that the White House ... Washington, April 27 Prominent television hosts and journalists have ...