Minimum Wage in Texas

I found an article posted by Eric Grieder on the Texas Monthly website titled “Raising the Minimum Wage Is Still a Good Idea for Texas.” In this article Grieder discusses a recent report that was written by the Congressional Budget Office, which is a nonpartisan organization whose goal is to provide an impartial analysis of how potential decisions made by Congress could affect our nations budget and economy.  The particular report Grieder is discussing in his post is related to how raising the federal minimum wage could affect our income levels as well as our employment levels.  Grieder uses the information provided by the CBO’s report to explain how he thinks raising the minimum wage would be a good thing for Texas and how we are in a position, as a state, where this would have little to no negative impact on our economy or employment rates.  I think the author does a great job at making his argument, he points out that Texas has put it self in a position, via the recent economic growth of the past few years, to not be severely negatively affected by raising the minimum wage.  I think Grieder is a credible source for this information, seeing as how he has written many articles on this very subject, which he provides links to in the article as well.  I think Grieder’s intended audience is, obviously, anyone who could be affected by the decision to raise minimum wage whether that’s the employers having to pay these wages or the employees earning them.  All in all I think this is a well-written article and definitely worth a read, especially for someone who wants to see how these decision made at a national level could affect our state.

Almost A Little More Equal

  Saturday night the U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, was scheduled to make a speech in New York during an event put on by the Human Rights Campaign. He announced that the U.S. Justice Department is now going to recognize same-sex married couples in any legal matters where the U.S. government has jurisdiction just as they recognize opposite-sex couples. Basically, what this means is now any federal benefits, entitlements, or protections that are given to married opposite-sex couples will now be provided for all legally married couples even if their marriage is not legally recognized by the state.

  Here’s the article, maybe they can explain it better than I can.

  I know this is somewhat more of a national government issue, but it does tie into this class and our state government. It gets a little wordy trying to explain without sounding like an episode of Law and Order, so I found a video that I thought gave a good example of how it affects Texas government. The video also has a clip of Sen. Ted Cruz stating his opinion on the Attorney General’s announcement. Link for the video.