Democrats call for minimum wage hike to ‘put middle class first’

CEDAR RAPIDS - Democratic candidates didn't let a little rain stop their campaign efforts Tuesday afternoon.

In fact, lieutenant governor candidate Monica Vernon and U.S. House candidate Pat Murphy stood in the rain for a half hour to deliver a message about raising the minimum wage and rebuilding the middle class.

Standing under an umbrella and surrounded by wet, shivering staff and campaign volunteers, Vernon called the outdoor news conference at Tomahawk Park in northeast Cedar Rapids 'the greatest venue of all.”

'We're on the edge of a wonderful middle class neighborhood” not far from shuttered industrial plants where former generations could find middle class jobs. Those middle class workers, she said, 'held up the sky for Cedar Rapids.”

'Today our economy is a lot different,” the Cedar Rapids city councilwoman and former business owner said at the Americans United for Change 'Put the Middle Class First” bus tour.

Now young people need a post-secondary education like those offered up the hill from the park at Mount Mercy University, she said.

Although unemployment in Iowa has declined during the past four years while Republican Gov. Terry Branstad has been in office, Vernon said, wages have fallen, too.

The Branstad campaign disputed that statement claiming since 2010, incomes for Iowans have grown faster than in 45 other states.

'Facts are stubborn things,” Branstad campaign manager Jake Ketzner said. 'Iowans have seen their incomes grow under the Branstad-Reynolds administration at a remarkable pace.”

Iowa has been a low-wage state, Vernon said, and that is why she and her running mate, gubernatorial candidate state Sen. Jack Hatch, are calling raising the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour.

She also called for a 'living wage,” which in Iowa is estimated to be $18 an hour.

Murphy was speaker of the Iowa House when the minimum wage was raised to $7.25. If hiked to $10.10, he said, 28,000 Iowans would be able to move off of food stamps.

'That's about making families succeed, it's about making them self-sufficient and providing for themselves,” he said.

He also called for protecting Social Security and Medicare – 'the strong social safety net.”

Unfortunately, he said, his Republican opponent Rod Blum, opposes a minimum wage hike, would privatize Social Security, 'voucherize” Medicare and eliminate the Department of Education.

But Blum spokesman Keegan Conway said Murphy, who 'has spent the last 25 years spending other people's money,” is resorting to 'his usual scare tactics on education instead of respecting the voters to engage them in an honest conversation.”

'Rod believes in giving Iowa families – not Washington bureaucrats – more choices and more control when it comes to their children's education,” Conway said.