“If we are going to be a society that insists we have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, then we can’t refuse to give people the bootstraps they need to pull themselves up,” Amy Jo Hutchison of West Virginia said at a February rally organized by the Poor People’s Campaign.

Hutchinson was speaking about the reluctance of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to support the gradual increase in the minimum wage to $15 per hour that Democrats had hoped to pass in their COVID-19 relief package—also known as the American Rescue Plan, or ARP.

Read the full article at MarketWatch.

Karen Dolan directs the Criminalization of Race and Poverty program at the Institute for Policy Studies. Uma Nagarajan-Swenson is an IPS Next Leader.

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